Japan is overall a quite safe and low-crime country, especially for a tourist. (Even the Yakuza, the biggest crime organization in Japan, leaves foreigners alone. In fact, Yakuza members are more likely to help you if you are a foreigner and are accosted by some punk.)
However, that doesn't mean that there are no scams, especially ones targeting tourists (because they ostensibly have no experience on the scams in question, compared to locals who have lived there their entire lives.)
One particular form of scam takes the form of street touts luring tourists into some bar or restaurant. Typically they make it enticing for example by offering the first round of drinks on the house, for free, and other similar benefits. These street touts can be extremely persistent and will most definitely not take a "no" for an answer.
If the tourists accept the offer they will be guided to the bar... which will usually not be a fancy street-facing bar with large signs, but some shadier bar in some second or third floor. Once there, the business model of order drinks and food first, pay the bill at the end of the night before leaving, will be used. Naturally the waiters at the bar will entice the tourists to buy as many drinks as possible, asking them several times what they want in a manner that entices the tourists to choose and accept something.
And the scam is revealed once the bill comes: All the drinks and food will be outrageously overpriced. Ten times, twenty times, thirty times more expensive than normally in other bars.
If the tourists refuse to pay, that's when the scary intimidation will start. The bar staff will physically stand blocking the exit and demand payment in an increasingly aggressive and threatening manner.
In some cases, as reported by some people, the scammers may even go a step further and outright dose the drinks with some drugs that make the tourists lose control and start accepting all the drinks they are offered, without even being aware what they are doing. Typically their credit cards will be just taken from them and charged without them even being aware of it. (Typically the credit cards are not outright stolen, and instead returned to the tourists, probably because outright stealing the credit cards will put the scammers at a much higher risk of the authorities looking into it.)
But what does this have anything to do with "anti-racism"?
By the fact that these scammers, including these street touts luring tourists, are overwhelmingly African, most typically Nigerian in particular.
In Japan, which is like 99.9% Japanese, they visually stand out like a sore thumb. Normal people would probably start thinking why is a quite clearly non-Japanese African-looking person asking them to follow him to some back alley or some shady bar on the second floor of the back of some building. Normal people might grow suspicious of all this.
However, many westerners, especially Americans, Canadians and Britons, have been brainwashed into "anti-racism" and thus the situation may even become the opposite: Either because they have been brainwashed into believing that black people are more trustworthy, or because they are morbidly afraid of being deemed racists, or a combination of both, they will be more likely to follow a Nigerian stranger into some shady bar. Even more likely than if it had been a Japanese person, or a white person.
These Nigerian scammers know this perfectly well and take full advantage of it.
Comments
Post a Comment