A luxury Audemars Piguet watch worth over 260,000 euros has been returned to a Tokyo shop with an apology letter after being stolen last week.
The shop in Tokyo's Nakano district received a parcel on 1 November containing the 46 million yen timepiece alongside a handwritten note expressing remorse, Japanese media reported on Monday.
The theft took place late last week when a man posing as an ordinary customer entered the boutique and asked to inspect the Audemars Piguet. After staff handed him the high-end watch, he slipped it onto his wrist and walked out of the store while still wearing it.
Package delivery and serial number check
The investigation took an unexpected turn on Sunday when an anonymous package arrived at the store by post. Inside the parcel, employees discovered the missing timepiece undamaged, together with the handwritten letter of apology from the perpetrator.
Police investigators called to the scene inspected the unique serial number engraved on the watch, allowing them to formally verify that it was the stolen item. When contacted by Agence France-Presse, representatives for the shop declined to comment.
The Asahi Shimbun daily newspaper and other Japanese media outlets reported the return on Monday, citing anonymous sources close to the investigation. Tokyo police confirmed that officers are continuing their search to identify and locate the suspected thief.
Previous watch theft in Nakano
The brazen daytime theft is not the first major crime to strike the commercial complex in recent months. In August, four luxury watches worth more than 1.13 million euros were stolen from another shop located in the same shopping centre.
Tokyo's Nakano district is internationally recognised as a major centre for the secondary luxury watch market, centred around the multi-level Nakano Broadway commercial complex. The shopping centre accommodates dozens of specialist boutiques that buy, sell, and trade rare vintage timepieces, drawing collectors from across Japan and overseas.
Luxury watch trade and market security
Audemars Piguet, founded in 1875 by Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet in the Swiss village of Le Brassus, is one of the oldest independent family-owned watchmakers in the world. The company is famed for high-end mechanical craftsmanship and prestigious models such as the Royal Oak, with rare pieces frequently fetching hundreds of thousands of euros on the open market.
High-value timepieces from premier Swiss manufactures are marked with individual serial numbers stamped on their cases and internal mechanisms. These identifying numbers are recorded in global databases of lost and stolen watches, making it virtually impossible for thieves to sell them to reputable dealers or submit them for official servicing without triggering an immediate police notification.
Tokyo police are continuing to review closed-circuit television recordings from the shopping arcade and examine postal tracking records in an effort to trace the package and apprehend the suspect.
