Shibuya may not be the cleanest neighborhood in Tokyo, but even for this part of town, this is shocking.
Last Sunday, my wife and I went out for dinner in Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s most popular entertainment districts. After we finished eating, we decided, on a whim, to walk to the next station over instead of hopping on the train at Shibuya Station for our ride home.
It turned out to be a good call, not only because the warm spring weather made for a pleasant evening stroll, but also because that same night, someone dropped dozens of human turds on one of the platforms at Shibuya Station.
Shortly after midnight, Japanese Twitter users started sending out tweets like the one below.
“There are like 30 turds on the Yamanote Line platform at Shibuya Station. Tokyo is a scary place.”
While you never want to run into piles of crap in a train station, their specific location in Shibuya was especially problematic. The Yamanote loop line which circles central Tokyo is the busiest in the nation, meaning the plops’ placement produced the maximum inconvenience. One witness said the turds formed a dotted line some 50 meters (164 feet) long, a portion of which can be seen in the rather disgusting photo below.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the timing of the incident came shortly before the last trains of the night, meaning that people had to make the choice between bearing with the disgusting conditions unless they wanted to take an expensive taxi home or spend the night in Shibuya.
The placement of the poo suggests that this was no accident, since any commuter experiencing sudden leakage would no doubt choose to stay in a single, less conspicuous spot while it was occurring. And as if there aren’t enough disturbing details already, the sheer volume of feces seems to be far too much for one person to produce in a single session, suggesting that this was either the work of multiple turd droppers, or of a lone perpetrator who’d stockpiled an ass-assembled arsenal which he then carried to the Yamanote platform.
The culprit remains at large, so for the time being, I recommend watching your step when walking through Shibuya Station, or perhaps not wearing your nicest shoes if you’ve got an appointment in that part of town.
Sources: Jin, J-Cast News via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Wikipedia/RGB256
Follow Casey on Twitter, where he assumes the bar he went to in Hiroshima that had signs instructing customers not to piss in the stairwell (which far too many people ignored) is no longer in business.