The latest “latest” method of coma rip-offs in Yushima, Tokyo….

Japanese Managers and Chinese Touts Join Forces in “Table Lending,” Causing Increasing Damage

One morning, Kenji Seta (pseudonym), a man in his 60s living in Tokyo, woke up to the sound of a horn and a severe headache. He had fallen asleep in a parking lot in downtown Yushima, a 10-minute walk from Tokyo’s Ueno Station, when he was awakened by a user who had come to park his car.

However, Mr. Seta had no memory of the parking lot. All he could remember was drinking with a friend in Yushima and parting before the last train.

In his haste, he looked in his wallet and found that all the bills were gone, and in their place was a single ATM statement.

They were looking for tonight’s sucker, but to their surprise, they had withdrawn 500,000 yen earlier that day. According to the walking route history on the pedometer app on her phone, she stayed at a building in Yushima from 1:00 a.m. to about 3:00 a.m., then went to a convenience store and withdrew 500,000 yen using her cash card,” Seta said.

Since the COVID-19 crisis of 2008, “coma rip-offs” have been rampant in Yushima. Chinese women touts to drunken customers on the street, inviting them to their favorite restaurants, telling them that they can have all they can drink for 3,000 yen until the first train leaves. If the customer did not have any money with her, she would take them to a nearby ATM and make them withdraw cash.

He was told, “There is no proof that I was involved in a crime,” and he has yet to file a damage report. I know I was staying in a small building, but I can’t remember which store I was in, and I can’t remember who took my money or how. It looks like I’ll just have to give up.”

The author retraced the route Mr. Seta took in Yushima after the last train. I expected to be swarmed by many touts, but no one approached me. However, when a middle-aged man with staggered steps was walking alone, the “girls” appeared out of nowhere, followed him at a distance, and called out to him at inconspicuous moments. Kota Ezaki (a pseudonym), who runs a restaurant in Yushima, told us.

We believe that someone is looking for suckers in cars flowing down the street or on the upper floors of buildings, and that these women are dispatched according to their instructions. It used to be that there were always groups of touts hanging out on the streets waiting for suckers, but recently the police have stepped up their patrols, and blatant touting on the streets is no longer possible.”

The author, who was not drunk, was probably not seen as a sucker. While the crackdown is intensifying, the latest methods of rip-offs are said to be becoming more vicious.

Some deaths have occurred due to increasingly violent tactics…

The practice of mixing sleeping pills and other drugs with alcohol, rather than simply getting people drunk, has become rampant. In the past year, I have seen many times a drunken person collapsed on the street in the morning and taken away by ambulance, and I heard that a middle-aged man was found unconscious on a street in Yushima in mid-May and later died. People who appeared to be his acquaintances came to the scene to pray for him. According to them, the police treated it as an accident.

We were surprised to hear the location of the accident. We were surprised to hear where it was, because it was right in front of the building where Mr. Seta had stayed before he lost the 500,000 yen.

The building was occupied by the snack bar “X,” which had been the subject of a string of online accusations of rip-offs, but was closed after the incident. The touts who used the restaurant as their stronghold have also disappeared from the town.

Even after X closed, countless rip-off stores and touts still lurk in Yushima. A person involved in the restaurant business in Yushima revealed, “There are still a lot of rip-off shops and touts in Yushima.

Some of the Chinese touts who are active in Yushima for the purpose of ripping off customers are believed to have come from Akabane and Shimbashi, where the crackdown on Chinese touts was tightened earlier, around 2010. Since these women did not have their own establishments in which to commit their crimes, they teamed up with existing snack bars and bars, and a system called “table rentals” was established in which they ripped off customers at these establishments and split the profits with the establishments.

In Yushima, table-renting has become a problem of “daytime collaboration” and rip-offs.

In Yushima, the problem of “Japan-China cooperation” through table rentals has become an issue. Some customers are more relaxed at Japanese-owned stores, which is convenient for the rip-off side.

There are some stores where the Chinese side seems to have taken over the management of the store, seizing the complicity as a weakness. The owner of the store is arrested as the responsible party, but the touts are not arrested if they return to their home country.

It is the season for a pleasant night stroll after a few drinks, but beware of the sweet whispers of touts.

From the November 7, 2025 issue of FRIDAY