

The bodies of two missing Chinese sisters in Japan were found last week, stuffed naked inside suitcases and abandoned in a mountainous forest near Tokyo.

The sisters, 25-year-old Chen Baolan and 22-year-old Chen Baozhen, went missing from their apartment in Yokohama on July 6th. Last Tuesday, the Chinese Embassy received a call from Japanese police regarding their disappearance. Then, on Friday, Japanese authorities called again to inform Chinese officials that the bodies had been found.

At a press conference in Beijing on Friday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang called on Japanese police to quickly catch and punish their murderers. A short time later, police announced that a married man in his thirties had been arrested for the crime. The man had allegedly been having an affair with one of the sisters. An autopsy report found that the women had died from strangulation.



The grisly and salacious murders quickly became a major topic of conversation on Chinese social media with many netizens writing in that while Japan may seem safe from the outside, it had “shown its true colors” this time as a country full of “deviants.”

Meanwhile, according to What’s on Weibo, some Chinese netizens have also blamed the women’s murders on their lack of “patriotism” with one Weibo user writing: “Why on earth did they go to Japan? That’s where they were wrong to begin with.”

And another adding: “A lot of Chinese girls go abroad to show off their wealth to their friends in China and give themselves some kind of status by finding a foreign boyfriend. There are really many of these women, what kind of example are they setting?”



This incident follows the disappearance last month of Chinese scholar Zhang Yingying from her University of Illinois campus. Late last month, the FBI arrested a 28-year-old former Ph.D. candidate at the university for her kidnapping. However, Zhang’s body has not yet been found.



