On the morning of November 9, Japanese police Matsudo discovered a woman covered in blood on the streets of the city’s Kogasaki district. She was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
The woman was a 33-year-old Chinese national who reportedly resided in Matsudo.
On Thursday, the incident became a trending topic on Weibo (#一中国女子在日本街头被杀害#) and was also widely discussed on other Chinese social platforms. Many people speculated about the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death and about the nationality of those linked to her death.
According to Chinese media reports, local witnesses reported to the police that they had heard a woman’s screams in the early hours of November 9. She was allegedly beaten by two men and was left in the streets in a pool of blood.
Image via Bunpone.
Japanese newspaper Asahi reports that a nearby resident called the emergency number around 3:10 a.m. to report the attack.
Police have now opened a murder investigation, citing hemorrhagic shock as the cause of death. The woman had sustained injuries to her face and other parts of her body, resulting in profuse bleeding, particularly in the head. Her belongings were scattered around the scene of the attack.
The Japanese police force is now searching for two male suspects in connection to the case. One of them is described as a man wearing a jacket and hat, approximately 180 cm tall (5 feet 11 inches). The other male is simply described as “skinny.”
On social media, numerous comments suggested that the suspects must be Chinese. Some argued that the description of a height of 180 cm wouldn’t match the average height of a Japanese man, while others asserted that such a brutal crime would just not typically be committed by a Japanese person.
These kinds of comments drew some controversy, and those suggesting that the perpetrators also must be Chinese were called jīngrì (精日), or “spiritually Japanese.” The term refers to a group of people in China who, despite being Chinese, identify themselves and want to be seen as Japanese (see Jiayun Feng’s article here).
The influential patriotic Weibo channel Diba Guanwei (@帝吧官微) condemned these people, and proposed that rather than fixating on the nationality of the suspects, the focus should shift to addressing concerns about the perceived lack of safety in Japan. The post also questioned why there have previously been many discussions about Japanese people supposedly being taller than Chinese people, whereas now it is suggested that the suspect must be Chinese because he’s relatively tall.*
There are also discussions about the dangers of Chinese females going abroad. Throughout the years, stories about Chinese women getting hurt or killed while traveling or studying abroad have consistently gained a lot of attention on Chinese social media.
One case that was particularly big was that of the two sisters Chen Baolan (陈宝兰, 25) and Chen Baozhen (陈宝珍, 22) getting murdered in Yokohama, Japan, in 2017. In July of that year, police arrested the main suspect: a 30-year-old married man from Japan who allegedly had an affair with one of the sisters.
Another notorious case is that of the 24-year-old Chinese student Jiang Ge (江歌), who was fatally stabbed outside her apartment in Tokyo in 2016. The 25-year-old Chinese graduate student Chen Shifeng (陈世峰) was charged with Jiang’s murder.
“Isn’t Japan known as a safe country?” some commenters wonder.
Japan is generally viewed as one of the world’s safest countries as it has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world; recording 0.2 homicides per 100,000 people in 2020 (the United States recorded 5.3).
We will update this story once more information comes out.
By Manya Koetse
* (The average height of Japanese men is about 171.8 cm. According to data from 2012, the average height of Chinese men would be about 167.1 cm, making Japanese men generally taller than Chinese. But according to a global survey published in the The Lancet in 2020, the average height of Chinese man saw a big rise over the years and 19-year-old Chinese males is now about 175.7 cm.)
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