Full marks for persistence and weirdness, but it’s still a crime.

Thanks to the country’s historically strict firearm control laws, police officers in Japan rarely have to worry about dealing with gun-wielding criminals. However, over the past few months Japanese law enforcement officials have arrested suspects for crimes committed using knives, sickles, and even fireworks, and now investigators in Hokkaido are searching for a man who armed himself with an eight-legged instrument of mayhem.

On July 27, at around 2 a.m. in the morning most of the city of Sapporo, the largest city on the northern island of Hokkaido, was sleeping. One resident of the city’s Chuo Ward, however, couldn’t because he kept hearing a thumping on the exterior wall of his condominium building. While Japan appreciates peace and quiet in its residential areas, most people won’t immediately call the cops at the first bit of noisiness. After the thumping had gone on for nearly an hour, though, the resident contacted the police, who came out and searched the area.

While they didn’t find any suspicious people lurking around, they did discover some suspicious seafood, in the form of a dead octopus which they said had been thrown against the building’s wall repeatedly. The octopus was uncooked and the carcass in pieces, though it’s unclear if that was due to damage from being tossed against the condominium over and over or if it had been cut into pieces by the perpetrator in order to be easier to throw.

No speculation has been made regarding a motive because…well because what possible reason could someone have for throwing an octopus at a building? If it’s just to cause a noise nuisance, it seems like a tennis ball, baseball, or basketball would produce more powerful reverberations throughout the building interior. And sure, raw octopi are kind of slimy, but if vandalism was the point raw eggs are messier, plus probably a lot easier to throw (not that we can say, seeing as how we’re sane people who’ve never thrown an octopus at a building).

On the other hand, a single octopus, with its rubbery resiliency, is no doubt cheaper than a full hour’s supply of throwing eggs, so maybe the culprit chose his unusual ammo because he saw it as a trade-off between grossness and cost-effectiveness. In any case, the suspect remains at large, but will hopefully be caught before he goes mad with sea life-flinging power and starts stockpiling squids and oysters, or perhaps gets recruited by the yakuza for his comfort in dealing with gross-looking aquatic creatures.

Source: Nico Nico News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he could go for some octopus sushi right about now.