As my life here in Cambodia gets longer and longer, I come to hear suspicious or shady words. Some people tell how great they are, being friends with government officials or having connections with Prime　Minister Hun Sen. In Japan, there are proverbs that say that too much speaking isn’t good. For example, “Eloquence is silver and silence is gold”, “The mouth is the gate of the devil” or “Better leave it unsaid”.
In fact, there would be some things to be done with top-down approaches in this country where all the low is not completely enacted. However, I have never heard about a successful business in that way.
It is fine if someone just wants to bluff to put up a good front, but if it is for cheating someone, it is a problem.
When I was in Japan, I had no experience to be cheated as I didn’t have much money for that, but when I first got a business offer from Cambodia which I had not been to and which I had no knowledge about, I thought that was a great deal. That was for a Japanese company that was going to expand the business into Cambodia and I was asked to be one of the officials of the company with Cambodian government officials. I was not asked for any money, but the investor for the business was Japanese, so it is highly possible that the investor had been cheated as well, but anyways, before the project moved forward, I got unable to contact them who gave me the offer, and the talk ended in smoke.
There are words and businesses which sound great if they happen in reality, so I wonder if I ever was able to make any of them happen in a decent way, but when there are bad people, the people who try to make it in decent ways could be regarded as bad as well. If Cambodian people are involved in such bad stuff, their impression of the whole Japanese people can be bad, too.
I might peculiarly feel this way because I have many opportunities to hear various kinds of stories because of my job, but there are more and more people one after another who plan nonsense things.
I recently heard a terrible story which I would write an article about with real names, but there is no evidence that it is a scam with no victims yet, so I would not write about it yet and just tell people around me to be careful, but if you hear such a story, you should make a careful judgment. The keyword is “Public construction”. Be careful with stories with the word.