Just because he was the enemy of upskirt voyeurs didn’t mean he was an ally of justice.
On the afternoon of May 12, Tokyo Metropolitan Police investigators say 30-year-old Daisuke Nohara, a resident of Tokyo’s Minato Ward, was at Ikebukuro Station when he saw another man secretly taking an upskirt photo of a woman walking up a flight of stairs. This was an offense he could not let go unanswered for.
So Nohara approached the man and told him, matter-of-factly, “You just took a picture up that woman’s skirt, didn’t you?” Rather than call the cops, though, Nohara planned to deal with the man himself.
After leading the photographer to a nearby park, Nohara pulled out his phone and placed a call, telling the man he was contacting the woman whose photo he’d taken. After talking on the phone for a few moments, Nohara told the man “They say the fine for what you did is one million yen (US$9,350). She’ll let the incident slide for about that much.”
Nohara’s proposition is immediately fishy. There’s no preset fine for upskirt photography, and if you care about protecting the public safety so much that you’re personally hauling perverts off to administer justice, you probably wouldn’t be willing to let them buy their way out of a police record and formal criminal charges anyway. For that matter, how did Nohara know the phone number of the woman who’d been the victim?
The answer to the second is that he didn’t. Investigators say Nohara was actually placing the call to an accomplice who was merely pretending to be the woman, and that instead of protecting the virtue of Tokyo’s ladies, he was actually just running a scam to fill his own pockets. Odds are the photographer saw through the phone call ruse and recognized Nohara’s offer for what it was, a blackmail attempt, but he still figured it’d be best to buy his silence., and agreed to pay up.
However, a police officer noticed the exchange taking place, and thought something didn’t seem quite right. After questioning Nohara, the officer placed him under arrest for the attempted shakedown. In addition, investiators say he’s now a suspect in two other instances of what they’ve dubbed “voyeur hunter” extortion cases that have taken place in the neighborhood this spring, in which the targets paid a total of roughly one million yen, and they’re now searching for Nohara’s accomplice as well.
Sources: Nitele News 24 via Livedoor News via Otakomu, Mainichi Shimbun Digital
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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