Little did 8 year-old Timmy know, that in 20 years his passion for collecting his Digletts and Ponytas would entail fraud, embezzlement, pedophilia and “xenophobia”.
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OK so first of all the thread title apparently confused some of you who replied below…
The store is refusing buyback requests from Vietnamese, so for example if a Vietnamese walked in and bought cards from the store they won’t refuse selling (don’t think the store can recognize Vietnamese by their faces anyway), but if Vietnamese walked with cards or products to sell then the store will refuse (as sellers are required to show their ID from which their nationality will be exposed).
The store had already stated that they won’t disclose the reason, but based on what the store was specialized in (box trades) and the transaction being refused (buybacks from Vietnamese), the best guess would be the store getting claims of resealed boxes, and by tracing back the buyback records they found that the resealed boxes were mostly from Vietnamese sellers, so they eventually decided to stop buying back from Vietnamese sellers.
As we all know new releases in Japan are being hit hard by malpractices such as organized scalping and resealing, and unfortunately Japanese had been long accusing Vietnamese and Mainland Chinese for most of these behaviors, which could be either fact or stereotypes. (In fact you can often see an offensive term ベトチャイ VietChi being used in SNS to describe the scalper groups).
But in either way the announcement was made by one specific store, so it’s still up to the store and its customers/sellers to decide whether to trade or not.
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Thanks. This explains a lot.
Maybe there is more to this but they clearly don’t want to expand their statement in case they cause an issue for themselves.
For what it’s worth, Vietnam loves Japanese culture and this is in spite of a difficult history between the two historically… But it’s also worth noting Vietnamese who can afford to travel to Japan aren’t indicative of the average person; I know some Vietnamese who’ve worked and lived in Japan, they absolutely loved it but they did receive some discrimination in day to day life.
There’s also massive Japanese investment in manufacturing and pharmaceutical amongst others in Vietnam, at least in the area I’m familiar with, so the countries are actually on good footing politically to my knowledge.
There were also huge gpu mining farms in Vietnam for crypto and I assure you the average citizen cannot afford one 3080 let alone hundreds - the very same applies to expensive singles, booster boxes, cases, etc.
Most likely this is related to a couple of groups scamming and in classic tradition it turns into a blanket racist response (this is hardly unique to Japan, I’m British and we see this kind of prejucide around though this particular action I believe would be illegal here.)
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