Two Chilean “tourists” just admitted they picked Japan for a crime spree because they heard the punishments here are a joke.
Spoiler: they heard wrong.
On August 21, 24-year-old Jeremy Paolo Piña Guzmán and 33-year-old Boris Alexis Manzano Quesada landed at Haneda from Australia. The next morning they were already wandering a well-off stretch of Ota Ward looking for an empty house.
They spotted someone driving away around 11:35 a.m., waited until the car was gone, rang the doorbell, and when nobody answered they smashed a window. One kept watch. The other went inside and grabbed three luxury watches plus seven other valuables worth about 7.9 million yen, plus a couple hundred euros in cash.
Manzano Quesada later told police the quiet part out loud:
“We’d heard back in Chile that sentences are light in Japan, so we went looking for a house to rob in a rich neighborhood.”
They didn’t even have a specific target before they arrived. They just strolled around until an opportunity appeared. That is not a heat-of-the-moment screw-up. That is shopping.
Three days later they hit a luxury watch shop in Nakano with a smash-and-grab. Then they bolted to Osaka, booked flights out through Italy (where they allegedly had a fence from earlier European jobs), and got picked up at a vacation rental on August 27.
One of them has also admitted to doing thefts “all over Europe,” sometimes hitting several houses a day.
Japan used to lean toward a quick deportation for foreigners who got into bar fights or petty shoplifting. A home invasion plus a multimillion-yen store job is a different category. Theft alone can carry up to 10 years. The pair have already been re-arrested for the Ota break-in, which resets the detention clock, and there are multiple possible charges stacked on top of each other: theft, property damage, trespassing.
So the rumor they heard in Chile — that Japan is an easy mark — is looking less like insider knowledge and more like the kind of thing people tell themselves right before they find out how long “pre-trial” can last here.
If you are actually visiting Japan to see temples, eat ramen, and buy too many souvenirs, none of this applies to you. If you are visiting because someone told you the courts go easy on foreigners who smash windows and grab watches… maybe don’t test that theory.