ghost motel lifts the veil on illegal Vietnamese immigrants

In the town of Bando, in Ibaraki Prefecture, there lived at least twenty men and women. There was also a restaurant and karaoke bar on the disused premises. There are 600,000 Vietnamese working in Japan, but they are also the largest group among the almost 10,000 scholarship holders who “disappeared” in the country last year.

Tokyo () – The first version from the authorities was that they were “people who had nowhere else to go” and who had overstayed their ordinary residence permits. At least that’s what a source close to investigators said, who opened an investigation after police found a group of 20 men and women of Vietnamese origin earlier this year. The group was discovered by officers during a search of abandoned motels in a town 50 km northeast of Tokyo, and lived together in a kind of community that also included a restaurant and a karaoke bar.

According to police reports, the Vietnamese – who have already been deported – lived scattered around a dozen disused motels in Bando, a town in Ibaraki prefecture. Some of them are believed to have fled Japanese companies where they worked as interns and interns in the technical sector. The accommodations were owned by a 40-year-old Vietnamese executive, accused in late October of facilitating their illegal stay by providing them with makeshift accommodation.

According to a source in the investigation, the executive told the police that she facilitated the accommodation after “a group involved in the illegal stay business asked her to do so.” Two to four people lived in each motel, paying a rent of 40,000 yen (about $262) per month per night.

Located next to the Tone River, the town of Bando has a population of about 50,000 and the main source of income for the area is vegetable harvesting. At the end of October, a Kyodo News reporter visited the area, characterized by a group of single-story U-shaped buildings, one of which could still read the old sign: “Vietnamese Restaurant.”

According to investigation sources, the majority of migrant workers in the area had moved to Japan with the perspective of obtaining qualified 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 in a short time due to low salaries or after being attacked by their bosses and department managers; hence the decision to move to disused motels after living in the neighboring prefecture of Chiba and exchanging information about this opportunity through social networks.

In Japan, many foreign technical trainees have disappeared from their jobs due to an unsuitable environment or one characterized by abuse and exploitation. According to data from the Japanese Ministry of Justice, up to 9,753 scholarship recipients disappeared in 2023 alone. Breaking down the classification by country, Vietnam tops the list with 5,481 people, followed by Myanmar with 1,765 and China with 816. Almost half of those missing were doing construction-related work, according to sources. A woman who lives near the motels remembers: “I couldn’t sleep because of the sounds of karaoke and the voices that echoed throughout the night.”

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