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“We’d heard Japan’s sentences are light” say foreign travelers arrested for Tokyo robberies

Casey Baseel Oct 1, 2026
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Pair of thieves broke into house in Tokyo one day after arriving in Japan.

On August 21, 24-year-old Chilean national Pinya Guzman and his 33-year-old countryman Mansano Quesad arrived at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on a flight from Australia. The pair were quite busy for the next few days, pulling a smash-and-grab robbery in a luxury watch shop in Tokyo’s Nakano neighborhood on August 25, fleeing halfway across the country to Osaka, and then getting arrested in a vacation rental property on August 27.

It turns out, though, the pair started breaking the law even earlier than initially thought. During the investigation into their activities after arriving in Japan, the police were able to determine that on August 22, the very next day after they landed, the two men also broke into a house in Tokyo’s Ota Ward, where they stole three more luxury watches and seven other valuable items with a total value of approximately 7.9 million yen (US$50,000).

The men, who have admitted to the August 22 break-in, say that they had not chosen their burglary target prior to arriving in Japan. Instead, they saw they went to a wealthy part of Ota Ward and simply walked around until they saw someone getting in their car and driving away from a house. After they spotted someone doing that at around 11:35 in the morning, they waited for the car to drive out of sight, then rang the house’s doorbell. When no one answered, they broke one of the house’s windows and Guzman acted as a lookout while Quesad entered the home and stole the watches, other items, and around 200 Euros in cash that he came across.

In explaining the motivation for such an unplanned, breezy burglary, Quesad told the police:

“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.”

The thieves say that they planned to sell some of their stolen goods to a fence in Italy who they know from previous thefts they committed in Europe. Investigators were also able to determine that airline ticket data had been sent to the pair’s smartphones for a departure from Osaka’s International Airport on the day they were arrested, with their scheduled route taking them through Italy on their way back to Chile.

As for whether or not Japan is soft on crime, theft alone can carry a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment, so it’s not like prosecutors are limited to doling out feckless slaps on the wrist. And in a broader sense of societal attitudes about criminal justice, while it’s not something that would be applied to property theft, the death penalty does exist in Japan, and unlike in Chile, it’s not reserved for extraordinary circumstances like treason or war crimes.

In addition, under Japan’s rearrest system, the Chilean pair, who were already in jail in Osaka, have now been rearrested for the home break-in, thus resetting the 23 days they can remain locked up before they even have to be formally arraigned. And since the burglary contains multiple potential charges (theft, property damage, and trespassing, to name just three), the time limit for their pre-arraignment incarceration could be reset a few more times too.

The two men (or whoever they got their info from) may have had the idea that the Japanese legal system is lenient on crimes committed by foreigners, which was, in a sense, true for many years. For quite some time, when foreigners in Japan got in trouble with the law, a speedy deportation was often the end result. However, this pattern existed in a time when foreigner-committed crimes in Japan tended to be predominantly things like a drunken bar scuffle, minor vandalism, or petty shoplifting, situations where things could be smoothed over by paying for repairs and an assurance that the perpetrator wouldn’t come back again. A multimillion-yen robbery, though, is something on a much higher level of heinousness, and a home break-in introduces the possibility of physical danger to anyone who might have been in the house or returned to it while the burglary was going on. Those aren’t the sort of things Japan is willing to just shrug its shoulders and say “Can’t be helped” over, especially with foreigner-committed crimes growing more frequent and larger in scale, causing many to worry that local laws and social norms aren’t being respected by visitors from overseas.

Source: Nitele News via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, Jiji, Asahi Shimbun, TBS News Dig, Shinjuku International Law Firm, Atom Law Firm
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