Some Japanese companies in China are offering to send their employees home after stabbings, employees say

By Joe Cash and Laurie Chen

BEIJING (Reuters) – Some Japanese companies in China have offered to send their employees and their families back home after a 10-year-old Japanese boy was stabbed to death in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, a Japanese manager and employees of Japanese companies said in Beijing on Friday.

Wednesday's stabbing was the second such attack near Japanese schools in China in recent months and came on the anniversary of a 1931 incident that sparked war between China and Japan.

The Japanese embassy met with the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and the Beijing Japanese School on Thursday evening to discuss the safety of the Japanese community in China, the embassy said in a statement.

The Japanese ambassador to Beijing, Kenji Kanasugi, also spoke with China's Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong and called on Beijing to strengthen security measures, the statement added.

The embassy did not mention any relocation, but the Beijing-based Japanese manager, who wished to remain anonymous given the sensitivity of the matter, said some companies were offering their employees this option.

Employees of four Japanese companies also said that some large companies in China had given their Japanese employees and their families the opportunity to relocate to their homeland at the company's expense, or were considering doing so.

The management and employees did not want to disclose further details.

“This is a really big shock,” the manager told Reuters. “And this is another case where a Japanese school has been targeted.”

“As for the temporary move, yes, that is true and many Japanese companies will do that,” he said. “We need to know why this happened again … otherwise we cannot live and work here.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry expressed its condolences to the victim's family on Thursday and described the crime as “an isolated case.”

Japan has called on the Chinese government to do everything possible to ensure the safety of Japanese nationals in the country and to disclose details of 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 to death on his way to school. The boy, a Japanese national with a Japanese father and Chinese mother, died a day later.

The attacker confessed to the attack on the boy and was previously arrested in 2015 for destroying public telecommunications 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)