Fake police phone scam also highlights dumb stereotype about how foreigners speak Japanese[Video]

Fake police officer targets possibly the worst person, phone transcript isn’t so great either.

In this article, we’ve got two things to talk about. Both of them are pretty dumb, but we’ll start with the one that’s illegal.

On March 16, the Iwate Prefectural Police released an audio recording of a conversation that took place after a man answered a call on his phone while in his workplace. It was from a number he didn’t know, but the caller quickly identified himself by saying “I am contacting you because I received a request for cooperation in an investigation by the Kochi Prefectural Police.”

It’s a long way, roughly halfway across the country, from Iwate to Kochi, but the caller explained that this was serious business. “There is a possibility that you have been involved in crime, and that you may have committed a crime, so we, the police, are moving forward with investigations from both of those perspectives.”

“I see” said the man who’d received the call, displaying more calmness than you’d expect from the average person faced with such news.

“Ayaka Nishino,” the caller continued. “Do you have some sort of relationship with that person?”

After a short pause, the man in Iwate, once again speaking with an impressively cool and collected tone of voice answered “I will come in for questioning. That name sounds familiar, so I’ll come to Kochi right now.”

▼ A Japanese news report featuring an audio recording of the phone call

It should be pointed out that in addition to Kochi being very far from Iwate, it’s also one of the trickier parts of Japan to get to. Located on the southwest corner of the island of Shikoku, it’s not anywhere close to the high-speed Shinkansen rail network. Even if you were to start in Morioka, Iwate’s largest city, which does have a Shinkansen stop and would allow you to take the bullet train for the first part of the journey, you’re still looking at a 9-hour train trip, with multiple transfers along the way.

▼ The train route from Iwate to Kochi

“This…yu…,” the caller stammered. “If ‘I’ll come’ because you want to get off the phone quickly, later on it’s going to put you at a disadvantage.”

▼ We’ll get back to that yu part later.

“I understand. I will come see you now,” the Iwate man replied. “You’re at the Kochi Prefectural Police’s Central Division, right?” If he seems rather blasé about the idea of having to talk with the police, well, that’s only to be expected, since the Iwate man is himself a police officer, and was in fact at the police station when he got the call on his phone and quickly realized that the caller was a scammer.

One of the stock scams that fraudsters pull in Japan is to call someone and pretend to be either a police officer or bank official. After scaring and confusing them with a vaguely detailed story about how their bank account may have been involved in some sort of crime, they ask for the victim’s account number and access code so that they can confirm that no wrongdoing took place, but actually use the information to rob them. Knowing the direction the scammer wanted the conversation to go in, the Iwate police officer decided instead to lean into the lie and act as though he’d bought the false identity so completely that he was willing to go all the way to Kochi to cooperate with the investigation.

“This is Shikoku,” the scammer forcefully reminded the man. “Look, please take this seriously, you. I can tell you’re just screwing with me.”

“No, I’m not screwing with you,” the police office insisted. “I’ll come to Shikoku.”

“If we can make a connection, we’ll carry out an investigation” the scammer warned, clearly starting to panic. “That’s fine. I’ll be coming to Shikoku,” the man, who still hadn’t revealed himself to be a police officer, good-naturedly replied.

Now really on his heels, the scammer issued the confusing command of “Please look into it on the Internet. Please look into it on your own on the Internet.” “OK,” the police officer said, after which the scammer finished with “Look into it on the Internet right away, and then call the Kochi Prefectural Police and tell them about what time you’ll be coming. OK, that’s all from me” before giving, and hanging, up.

Given how the man in Iwate never seemed, even for a moment, to be the least bit rattled or intimidated by the scammer’s story, it’s impressively dumb that he didn’t abort the call sooner, since he clearly wasn’t going to squeeze any money out of his intended victim. It’s unclear whether or not the Iwate Prefectural Police have been able to determine the scammer’s identity or otherwise track him down, but they did release the audio of the call as a reminder to the public to be on guard against ploys of this nature.

Ah, but I said we’ve got two dumb things to discuss here, didn’t I? The second one has to do with linguistics, and by extension linguistics-related perceptions.

▼ Hello again!

Though the conversation took place in Japanese, the caller’s pronunciation and intonation have a few unnatural sounding quirks to them. It’s not particularly difficult to understand what he’s saying, and his accent isn’t all that thick, but he doesn’t quite sound like a native speaker of Japanese either.

This might explain why, in the on-screen transcript of the conversation shown in the video, when the scammer is stammering in surprise after the Iwate man says he’ll come to Shikoku, the transcript lists the yu sound the scammer makes as being the English word “you.”

In Japanese, the caller says Kore…yu…hayaku kiritai kara ikimasu nara ato kara fuuri ni naru. Breaking that down into its intelligible parts, we’ve got:
● kore: this
● hayaku: quickly
● kara: because
● ikimasu: will go/come
● nara: if
● ato kara: from a later time
● fuuri: disadvantage
● ni naru: will be

The grammar is mostly OK, but it needs a “you’re saying” or some other kind of connecter between ikimasu and nara. It’s not the type of mistake a native Japanese speaker would make, even if they were flustered or panicking.

But also on the subject of mistakes someone wouldn’t make because of their linguistic background, there’s virtually no chance that the yu that the scammer said was him suddenly slipping into English because his Japanese language skills aren’t up to snuff. No one who can handle saying “There is a possibility that you have been involved in crime, and that you may have committed a crime, so we, the police, are moving forward with investigations from both of those perspectives” is going to suddenly forget anata, the standard Japanese word for “you.” That’s just not how language acquisition works. You don’t forget such a basic, fundamental, frequently used piece of vocabulary like how to say “you” in the foreign language, no matter how nervous you are, if you’re also able to get through the sort of more complex statements the scammer was making. There’s also the fact that the scammer himself says anata in the conversation, when he tells his intended victim “Anata mou ii kagen ni shite kudasai yo” (“Look, please take this seriously, you.”).

For that matter, it’s also worth noting that though the scammer has an accent, it isn’t consistent with the idiosyncrasies that commonly remain when native English speakers are learning Japanese, making it all the more likely that his yu is simply some sort of unintended, unconscious sound of surprise than any sort of actual intended word.

Ah, but wait, if the yu in Kore…yu…hayaku kiritai kara ikimasu nara ato kara fuuri ni naru isn’t the English “you,” then why can we translate the sentence as “This…yu…If ‘I’ll come’ because you want to get off the phone quickly, later on it’s going to put you at a disadvantage”? Because in Japanese, especially spoken Japanese, the subjects of verbs are routinely omitted if they can be understood by context.

There is, unfortunately, a very common perception/portrayal in Japanese media of English-native foreigners with less-than-fluent Japanese language skills peppering their sentences with the English “you” and “me” (and often randomly, with no regard to which of the two would be used for that situation) instead of equivalent Japanese pronouns. It’s been going on for decades, and no doubt became extra-solidified by the popular TV series YOU wa Nani Shi ni Nihon e?, a well-meaning and often interesting program in which foreigners traveling in Japan are interviewed about what drew them to the country, and whose title is meant to mean “What Did You Come to Japan to Do?” Still, native-English speakers cramming “you” into their sentences when speaking Japanese is a lazy, uniformed assumption to make about speakers of a to-them foreign language, similar to believing that if a native Spanish-speaker isn’t fluent in English, sooner or later they’ll definitely mess up and say “grande” instead of “big,” even if they’re capable of using much more difficult and specialized English vocabulary with aplomb.

It should be noted that it’s not clear if the English “you” in the video’s on-screen text was decided on by the Iwate Police or the video news report’s producer. Hopefully, though, one day we’ll be able to live in a world without phone scams or dumb linguistic stereotypes, or at least fewer of them…especially when they are so many genuine, and often hilarious, mistakes for leaners of Japanese to make instead.

Source: Teleasa News, YouTube/ANNnewsCH
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2) (edited by SoraNews24
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