Tokyo: ghost motel lifts the veil on illegal Vietnamese immigrants

In the town of Bando, Ibaraki prefecture, at least 20 men and women lived in a community. There was also a restaurant and a karaoke bar in the disused facilities. There are 600,000 Vietnamese working in Japan, but they are also the largest group among the nearly 10,000 trainees who have ‘disappeared’ in the country over the past year.

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - The authorities' first version was that they were “people who had nowhere else to go” and had overstayed their regular residence permits. At least that is what was said by a source close to the investigators, who opened an investigation after the police found a group of 20 men and women of Vietnamese origin earlier this year. The group was spotted by officers during a search of some abandoned motels in a town 50 km north-east of Tokyo, living together in a sort of community that also included a restaurant and a karaoke bar.

According to police reports, the Vietnamese - who have since been deported - were living scattered around a dozen disused motels in Bando, a town in Ibaraki Prefecture. It is believed that some of them had fled from Japanese companies where they worked as interns and internal trainees in the technical sector. The accommodation facilities were originally owned by a 40-year-old Vietnamese business executive, who was indicted in late October on charges of facilitating their illegal stay by providing them with makeshift accommodation.

According to an investigative source, the executive told the police that she provided the accommodation after being ‘requested to do so by a group involved in the illegal stay business’. Two to four people lived in each motel, who paid a rent of 40,000 yen (about 2) per month for overnight accommodation.

Situated along the Tone river, the town of Bando has a population of about 50,000 and the main source of income in the area is the harvesting of vegetables. At the end of October, a Kyodo News reporter visited the area, characterised by a group of single-storey, U-shaped buildings, with one of the buildings still bearing the old sign, which read ‘Vietnamese Restaurant’.

According to investigative sources, most of the migrant workers in the area had moved to Japan with the prospect of skilled employment in the technical sector and with the aim of ‘being able to earn money’ in the Land of the Rising Sun. However, most of them left their jobs within a short time due to low wages or after being assaulted by their bosses and department managers; hence the decision to move to disused motels after living together in the neighbouring prefecture of Chiba and exchanging information about this opportunity via social media.

In Japan, many foreign technical trainees have disappeared from their jobs due to an unsuitable environment or one characterised by abuse and exploitation. According to data from the Japanese Ministry of Justice, as many as 9,753 trainees disappeared in 2023 alone. Breaking down the ranking by country, Vietnam tops the list with 5,481 people, followed by Myanmar with 1,765 and China with 816. Almost half of all the missing were engaged in construction-related work, sources said. A woman living near the motels recalls: ‘I couldn't sleep because of the sounds of karaoke and voices echoing throughout the night’.

By the end of October 2023, the number of foreign workers in the country had reached a record level of 2 million. However, a number of factors, including the unfavourable exchange rate and an increasingly critical economic situation, have made the Rising Sun less and less attractive. In particular, there has been a significant drop among Vietnamese, who represent the largest group of foreign workers, with 600,000 expatriates living, studying or working in 47 prefectures and cities.