Posts Tagged ‘crime’

Lost in Translation?

A short clip from a TBS News report about crack dealers in the United States shows that Japanese subtitles sometimes fail to capture the beauty of certain English phrases:

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Fur coat heist in Japan

A surveillance video shows a thief breaking the window of a store　in Gifu and making off with some fur coats:

The whole incident took less than a minute. The missing coats were valued at around 2 million yen ($22,000).

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Arresting illegal immigrants in Japan

Two clips from an Japanese TV show that followed around police officers in Kanagawa as they arrested illegal immigrants:

It is interesting to note that the first clip ends with the revelation that the two illegal immigrants had a child in Japan who is now attending elementary school. This would mean that the child is undocumented and will be treated as an illegal alien and deported along with her parents. This report aired a couple months ago, and I haven’t seen any news stories about the child. It would seem she was probably deported without any major dispute. I’m guessing it was because she is considerably younger than Noriko Calderon and probably didn’t enjoy the level of community support that locals gave to the Calderon family.

The second clip is about a raid on an apartment rented through an illegal broker service. An Asahi article about brokers that rent apartments for illegal immigrants can be found archived on Debito.org (the Asahi does not maintain a public archive of its web articles).

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Trash from Korean fishermen litters Japan’s beaches

A follow-up to yesterday’s post about Korean fishermen illegally entering Japanese territorial waters, this time about the trash they leave behind and its effect on Japanese beaches:

Larger Korean fishing boats can carry over 10,000 eel traps. According to the news program, some 10% of these traps are lost on each fishing trip. The fishermen interviewed don’t seem to think much of losing a few cheap plastic traps. The lost eel traps are washed ashore in Japan, where their disposal has become a very expensive burden.

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Foreigners spotted near scene of attempted murder

An NTV report about an incident that took place last month in Mushashimurayama City, Tokyo:

On August 13th at around 11:30PM, a woman riding a moped collided with a rope that had been strung across a road. She was thrown to the ground and suffered serious injuries, including a fractured skull. Police are treating the incident as a case of attempted murder.

According to locals, a group of 3 or 4 “suspicious young foreigners” spotted in the area shortly before the incident.

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Foreigner feigns ignorance of Japanese to avoid speeding ticket

A clip from yesterday’s “Real Time News” in which a police officer in Kanagawa prefecture stops a Mercedes Benz that was traveling at 128 km/h (80mph), 58 km/h over the speed limit:

The driver of the car is a foreigner, and when the Japanese police officer starts speaking to her in Japanese, she pretends she can’t understand and speaks English. The officer cannot speak English and isn’t quite sure what to do. If he were to give up and wave off the foreigner without a ticket, his action would be caught on film and he would no doubt end up like the Tokyo police officer who resigned in shame recently for failing to enforce the law in a similar circumstance.

The officer continues to speak in Japanese to the woman. Eventually he notices that she seems to understand what he is saying, so he suggests that she can actually understand Japanese. She finally caves and and admits she can speak “a little” Japanese. He then informs her of that driving 128 km/h in a 70 km/h zone is a grave speeding offense that will result in a suspension of her license. The woman is shocked, so shocked that she suddenly develops the ability to speak enough Japanese to make the accusation that, “this country doesn’t treat gaijin like humans.” The officer says he is not treating her in such a way.

She starts to cry and say (in Japanese) that she will kill herself. The officer calms her down, tells her to drive carefully, and sends the woman away with a ticket. The woman will have a chance to dispute the ticket in court. Hopefully the judge will have a chance to see the video footage of the incident and get a look at how she tried to weasel her way out of taking responsibility for her violation of the law.

I don’t believe this woman’s action to be an isolated incident. I’ve met quite a few foreigners who swear by the “I don’t speak Japanese” method of avoiding traffic tickets, and anecdotal evidence across the internet seems to support the claim that this kind of thing is very common. When police officers are not on camera, many prefer to let foreigners off without a ticket instead of going through the hassle of dealing with the language barrier.

Note: This is just a short clip from a segment that included several other lawbreakers, all of whom were Japanese. Its primary focus was not on foreign criminals.

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