Wallets and cell phones belonging to 170 students were stolen from the hotel they were staying at in Shiga Kogen in Nagano Prefecture, police said Saturday.
Police said about 800,000 yen in cash in wallets and purses, cell phones and train passes were stolen from a locked room where they had been stored for safekeeping, Fuji TV reported.
The Hotel Sunny Shiga in Yamanouchi is the same hotel where 340 students from the Waseda Academy in Tokyo had their wallets stolen, along with about 100 smartphones, during a summer training camp last August. Those items were never recovered and the thieves not caught.
In the latest incident, the students were girls from a high school in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, on a ski trip to Nagano. They had arrived for a three-night stay on Jan 6.
After the August incident, the hotel installed security cameras in the lobby and near the front desk. The students' valuables were kept in a locked room behind the front desk. Police said the valuables were still in the office when a hotel employee checked them at 11:30 p.m. on Jan 7. However, they were gone at 7:30 a.m. the next morning.
The surveillance cameras showed nothing suspicious, police said, adding that the office had not been ransacked.
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