By Joe Cash and 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.
The Japanese embassy met with 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.
Employees at four Japanese firms 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.”
China’s foreign ministry on Thursday expressed its condolences to the victim’s family, and called the crime “an individual case”.
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.
The embassy did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
On Wednesday, a 44-year-old man surnamed Zhong stabbed the 10-year-old boy on his way to school. The boy, who was a Japanese national born to a Japanese father and a Chinese mother, died a day later.
The assailant has confessed to attacking the boy and had previously been arrested in 2015 on the charge of destroying public telecoms facilities, Chinese media reported on Friday.
(Reporting by Joe Cash and Laurie Chen in Beijing; Additional reporting by Sakura Murakami in Tokyo; Editing by Christian Schmollinger and Miral Fahmy)
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