A worker at a popular garden in the heart of Tokyo has cost the facility millions of yen because he was “too frightened” to ask foreign visitors to pay the admission fee.
The unnamed man, who has since retired, said he had stopped collecting admission fees of 200 yen for adults and 50 yen for children since April 2014, and had continued to allow foreign visitors in free of charge for about two and a half years. As a result, about 160,000 people entered the garden without paying. It had lost at least 25 million yen in total.
The man said that being yelled at by a non-Japanese visitor years ago had made him wary of overseas guests. “I don’t speak any other language and I got scared when a foreigner began yelling at me a long time ago,” he said. The man handed out tickets without charging for them, then asked a colleague with access to the garden’s database to cancel the sales so there would be no difference between recorded and actual revenue(总收入).
The ruse(诡计) worked until late December 2016 when another member of staff saw him behaving strangely when issuing a ticket to a foreign visitor and reported it to management. The man’s salary was cut off 10%. He asked to take retirement and offered to return half of his retirement bonus, about 300,000 yen.