As a proud resident of Osaka Prefecture it’s always nice to see the place excel at something. Even for something as nefarious as purse snatching, it seems that the Osaka way is to go big or go home.

So let’s all give Osaka a big round of applause for being number one in incidents of purse snatching for the third year in a row! Even though stats are only available up until October, so many cases of people grabbing women’s bags and running away – or riding away as is often the case – have occurred that we have officially clinched the standings for 2013.

Osaka’s total number of purse snatching incidents currently stands at 1,244 for this year. To put that figure into perspective, Kanagawa Prefecture came in second for purse snatching with a measly 811 cases, a mere two-thirds that of Osaka. Third place went to Saitama who had 758.

Even police are declaring that the competition is over this year saying “it’s impossible to reverse this trend now, but we hope to suppress the increase even a little by the end of the year.”

Police in the area started off the year optimistically with a campaign aimed at heightening pedestrians’ alertness to suspicious people. Unfortunately, by March this year Osaka had already acquired a commanding lead over all of Japan’s other prefectures.

However, purse snatching fans around Osaka (there’s got to be one or two around here somewhere) are still sour. This should have been the prefecture’s 38th consecutive number one spot, but in 2010 Chiba Prefecture for some reason experienced a snatching epidemic that surpassed even that of Osaka.

For the other 99.999 percent of people who feel that purse snatching is a menace to society, take comfort in the fact that the rate of this crime has fallen by 12 percent from the same time last year and has been steadily decreasing overall in the past decade.

Sill, as depressing as it is, a win is a win. I think I’ll celebrate with a glass of champagne. Let me just get my man-purse… Ah, son of a-!

Source: Yomiuri Online (Japanese)
Top Image: Funabashi City
Bottom image: Osaka Prefecture

▼ Here, the Osaka Prefecture safety mascot shows how to wear a bag to protect against snatching.