Rage-filled 27-year-old mobile phone shopper denies the kicking part, though.

For the first decade after I moved to Japan, I had jobs that required me to work nights and weekends. So even now, whenever I go into a shop or restaurant while most of the world is in full leisure mode, I feel extra grateful to the staff who are still hard at work .

However, a 23-year-old man working at a mobile phone shop in Hyogo Prefecture’s Amagasaki City, near Kobe, didn’t get much in the way of respect from one of his customers last Saturday night.

Shortly before 7 p.m., a 27-year-old woman walked into the store, wanting to buy a phone and sign up for service. In addition to filling out some paperwork, the clerk told her she’d also have to show some sort of ID, which really isn’t an unreasonable requirement. After all, the whole point of having a mobile phone is that you can take it anywhere, so proving that the name and address you give are legitimate is kind of important so that the service provider knows where to find you when it needs to get paid.

However, the woman didn’t have a driver’s license on her, nor was she able to produce any alternate form of identification. So instead, according to the Hyogo Prefectural Police’s Amagasaki Precinct, she began kicking the clerk in the butt.

Unfortunately for her, proof that she is a woman with a sturdy foot who’s prone to violence is still too vague to function as legal identification, so instead of giving her a phone, the shop used their own to contact the police, who formally arrested the woman the next day on suspicion of assault. For her part, the woman has denied the charges, saying “I don’t know if I kicked the clerk or not.” That defense will probably be about as effective as her attempt to circumvent the store’s ID requirement, though, since “I’m not sure which exact appendages I used when I launched myself as a ball of fury at someone who was just doing his job” generally isn’t seen as a valid excuse in the eyes of the law.

Source: Yahoo! Japan News/Kobe Shimbun Next via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he was kicked in the butt during the brawl he got into in Shibuya Station.