Looking at sexy anime and manga is a time-honored way of rubbing away work-caused stress in Japan, but you’re supposed to wait until after work.

In its mission statement, Kobe University waxes poetic about “working in a spirit of integrity, freedom, and cooperation,” which are all admirable virtues for an institute of higher learning. Still, there are limits to how far such freedom can be stretched, and the school has drawn the line at the actions of one employee.

The 40-something male administrative worker (whose name has not been released) was hired back in 2016 to perform clerical work, such as document management, as well as to provide general assistance to the human resources department. However, he decided to take on one more project as well: using a workplace computer to look at lots and lots of porn.

Following an anonymous written tip-off the school received last December, an investigation was carried out in which it was discovered that the worker had spent 1,220 hours looking at adult websites since he was hired, with his go-to source for his fetish fix being the erotic manga and illustrations of the adult section of Japanese image-sharing website Pixiv.

▼ We’re guessing he had a work desk that obscured his lower body.

The man has admitted to the allegations, saying “I did it to relax between assignments,” but that doesn’t seem to necessarily mean he limited his sexy manga browsing to his official break times, as his computer-use logs show that roughly 730 of the hours he spent on adult sites coincided with times he was supposed to be working.

On Tuesday, Kobe University announced that the man is being suspended from work for six months, which seems like a surprisingly lenient punishment for spending an average of 50 hours a month perusing pornography in the office. Still, maybe the school is right, and giving the man time to reflect on his actions will help him appreciate the importance of adhering to more chaste behavior when in a professional setting…or maybe the school is hoping that by giving him half a year to look at as much erotic manga as he wants, he’ll be able to come back to work having gotten all of his pent-up energies out of his system. Either way, we hope that for the sake of whoever is filling in for him while he’s gone, the school at least replaced his work keyboard.

Source: Livedoor News/Sankei News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso

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