Vietnam: Fishermen’s Lucky Catch Turns Out to Be a Drowned 3-Year-Old [NSFL]

A 3-year-old boy drowned in Vietnam’s floodwater and turned up in a fisherman’s rowboat near the bank. There’s an old Japanese fishermen’s superstition that finding an unidentified drowned body brings a big catch. Nobody at this riverbank looked like they were celebrating.

Video

Camera	Length	Shows
Phone video	0:24	Aftermath only

• 0:05 Body spotted lying in the rowboat
• 0:07 Uniformed official arrives on the bank
• 0:15 Boat poled back toward the crowd
• 0:19 Man in the boat leans over the body

A wooden rowboat carries the boy’s small body along a flooded, muddy riverbank in Vietnam. A uniformed official and a growing crowd watch from the bank as the boat is poled in close to shore.

What the Thread Said

Most of the thread fixated on the folklore angle, asking whether the old fishing legend was even true. One commenter got oddly technical about it, explaining that trapped air in the lungs is why drowned bodies tend to float face-down like that. A quieter few just hoped the boy finds some peace wherever he ended up.

Vietnam’s Child Drownings, and Japan’s Drowned-Buddha Luck

The boy in this photo drowned in Vietnam, but old Japanese fishing villages treated an unknown drowned body, a nagare-botoke or drifting Buddha, as a lucky find worth a big catch.

• 5.70 per 100,000: Vietnam’s drowning rate for kids 0-14 in 2019, above the 4.20 world average
• About 2,000 kids under 16 drown in Vietnam every year
• 1 in 4 global drowning deaths are kids under 5
• 19 down to about 6: Vietnam’s child drowning rate per 100,000 from 2000 to 2019
• 5.8 million+ kids got government swim lessons in Vietnam from 2021 to 2024

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