By Joe Cash, Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) -Some Japanese companies in China have offered to send their staff and their families back home after a 10-year-old Japanese boy was fatally stabbed in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, a Japanese executive and employees of Japanese firms in Beijing said on Friday.
Wednesday’s stabbing was the second such attack near Japanese schools in China in recent months, and took place on the anniversary of an incident in 1931 that triggered war between China and Japan.
Japanese embassy officials met the Japanese chamber of commerce and the Beijing Japanese School on Thursday night to discuss the safety of the Japanese community in China, the embassy said in a statement.
Japan’s ambassador to Beijing, Kenji Kanasugi, also spoke to China’s Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong and asked Beijing to step up security measures, the statement added.
The embassy did not mention anything about relocation, but the Beijing-based Japanese executive, who requested anonymity given the sensitivity of the matter, said some companies were offering the option to their employees.
The embassy did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Employees at four Japanese companies also said some big firms in China have given Japanese employees and their families the option to be relocated home at the company’s expense, or are considering doing so.
The executive and the employees declined to give any further details.
“It is a really heavy shock,” the executive told Reuters. “And this is another instance where a Japanese school was targeted.”
“As for the temporary leaving, yes, that is true, and many Japanese companies will do so,” he said. “We need to know why this happened again… otherwise, we can’t live and work here.”
Japan has urged the Chinese government to do its utmost to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals there, as well as provide details on the incident, the Japanese embassy said.
China’s foreign ministry on Thursday expressed its condolences to the victim’s family, and called the crime “an individual case”.
“Our TV station has also issued a notice saying that if a family member of a stationed employee wants to return home, the station will help subsidize it. But at the moment none of my colleagues plan to return home,” said an employee of a Japanese media company based in Beijing.
China ranks first in terms of the number of overseas bases of Japanese companies, according to Japan’s foreign ministry, with some 31,000 firms represented in the $19 trillion economy.
STRAINED TIES
The personal safety concerns prompted by the Shenzhen stabbing are threatening to complicate already strained bilateral ties.
Diplomatic relations took a dive after Beijing detained a Japanese businessman in 2023 on suspicion of spying.
In the aftermath of the incident, some Chinese internet users questioned whether China’s nationalist education had contributed to anti-Japanese sentiment. Anti-Japanese comments often trend on Chinese social media despite heavy censorship of other topics.
A Chinese news website that often takes hawkish, nationalist positions on Friday criticised netizens that “put the blame (for the crime) on ‘hateful public opinion’ or ‘hateful propaganda,’ which is not true, and even blame China’s patriotic education.”
“Urging Japan to rectify its historical attitude… is an act of righteousness or justice,” read the commentary on Guancha.cn.
Some 14 million Chinese people died and 100 million more were made refugees following Japan’s invasion and occupation of parts of its neighbour during World War Two, historians estimate.
(Reporting by Joe Cash and Laurie Chen in Beijing; Additional reporting by Sakura Murakami in Tokyo; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Miral Fahmy and Alex Richardson)
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