If, like those of us here at WoWasis, you’re a veteran traveler in SE Asia, you’ve done business with the Triads, the underworld syndicates that have their hands in businesses ranging from noodle shops, to food carts, to politics. That goes for some Western cities too, including London, New York, and cities in the San […]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Crime Scams & Espionage' Category
WoWasis book review: ‘Gold Warriors’ by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
Sterling and Peggy Seagrave continue to amaze your WoWasis review staff. We’re veteran SE Asia travelers, and like many travelers revisiting the region, have more and more questions about the political and cultural factors that drive decisions and events in these countries. In the past couple of years, we’ve been hearing anecdotal stories from associates […]
Read the rest of this entry »Judge puts the kibosh on more NGO pedophile follies in Cambodia
Here at WoWasis, we earlier this year reported on alleged scams run by NGOs (non-governmental organizations) in Southeast Asia that have resulted in false allegations of pedophilia on the part of innocent Westerners. In August of this year, a Cambodian judge ruled in favor of a man he considered unjustly accused. According to the Phnom […]
Read the rest of this entry »6 Tips to avoid being drugged & robbed Thai street women
Judging by news stories and interviews with a number of individuals conducted by WoWasis researchers, the practice of Thai street ladies meeting a man on the street, accompanying him to his hotel room, drugging him, then robbing him while unconscious, is rampant. In each case, the process is identical. While in the man’s room, the […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: ‘The Yamato Dynasty’ by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
Here at WoWasis, we’ve never read a Sterling Seagrave book that we could easily put down. We were glued to our chair, reading The Yamato Dynasty: the Secret History of Japan’s Imperial Family (1999, ISBN 0-7679-0496-6) by Seagrave and his wife Peggy Seagrave, when our back gave out, and we were now really glued to […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Iris Chang’s ‘The Rape of Nanking’
When we at WoWasis attended Iris Chang’s funeral in 2004, it became apparent to us, after the heartfelt tributes of her friends and family, that she was Japan’s final Nanking victim. For a number of years, Chang lived and breathed the Nanking massacre as she was writing her book. After it was published, the ghosts, […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Christopher Seymour’s ‘Yakuza Diary’
One of the joys of visiting used bookstores is finding past gems, like Christopher Seymour’s Yakuza Diary: Doing Time in the Japanese Underworld (1996, 0-87113-604-X). Seymour, in riding around with and interviewing various Yakuza, seems to be, by the end of the book, clearly a fan of the Yakuza subculture. There are loads of great […]
Read the rest of this entry »Building scams in Thailand: Why is my concrete structure falling apart?
We here at WoWasis first discovered a remarkable example of mass building fraud when we began looking to buy older condominiums in Bangkok. We probably looked at ten structures in the Sukhumvit Soi 1- Soi Asoke area. All condo structures had one thing in common: they were all literally falling apart. The most grievous structural […]
Read the rest of this entry »WoWasis book review: Sterling Seagrave’s ‘The Marcos Dynasty’
Travelers to the Philippines will invariably want to find out more about the history of the country after having seen it, but good books (and bookstores!) in the Philippines are hard to find. In particular, books on Philippine history are virtually impossible to be found anywhere. In the picturesque northern Luzon city of Vigan, for […]
Read the rest of this entry »Welcome to the WoWasis China Bookshelf
Chinese philosophy and business practices have long influenced Southeast Asia. Here at WoWasis, we found the following books to be especially compelling for Westerners, as the information in the books on this list, while particular to China, helps to explain much about life in Southeast Asia. We’ve grouped them into Nonfiction and Fiction categories. Nonfiction […]
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