The streets just got a little safer.

It was a scorching hot July morning when I awoke to my phone ringing. It was the district attorney asking me if I had seen the news. When I responded that I hadn’t he just sighed and told me to turn on the nearest TV.

When I did, plastered all over the news on every channel were reports of a 45-year-old construction worker who was arrested on vandalism charges. According to reports, sometime between 4:20 and 4:40 p.m. on 17 April, the suspect had scrawled “unkopuuuun” on the seat of a public toilet in Nishinomiya, Osaka.

The semi-sensical onomatopoeic Japanese phrase which translates to something along the lines of “Pyewwww Poop” seemed to describe a particularly smelly bowel movement belonging to either the suspect or person who used the toilet before him. It was accompanied by a crude sketch of a turd in black marker.

▼ CGI recreation based on police reports, the stink lines are assumed

As a court-appointed lawyer for this area, it was up to me to defend this man in a court of law. To make matters worse he was also connected to two other incidents of “unkopuuun” written on toilets in JR Mita Station on 21 and 24 March. The reports had even said that the man had admitted to the charges against him when security camera footage showed him at the scene.

You might be thinking that some criminals are simply too rotten to be rehabilitated and that people like this should receive the fullest form of punishment. I can’t say I disagree with you, but I had taken an oath to represent my clients to the best of their ability, no matter how reprehensible they are.

I decided to start my investigation by getting the word on the street in search of leads, so I threw on my trench coat and fedora and hot-footed it to my computer to see what people were saying about all this online.

“Maybe there was no washlet, so he let out his anger in a doodle?”
“A 45-year-old wrote “Unkopuuun” LOL!”
“He is a little too in touch with his inner child.”
“This is the most adorable crime of the century.”
“Maybe it was Banksy?”
“He’s 45 going on 2.”
“If he was doing an homage to Hiro Yoshida’s ‘Mayuge Booon!’ gag, I’d approve.”

That’s it! According to the Osaka criminal code, if an offense is committed in the spirit of its traditional culture of comedy bits, then they are protected by the constitution. Therefore, if I could prove that this man was honoring Hiro Yoshida, he could still walk thanks to his inalienable right to lame jokes.

Hiro Yoshida is a comedian who was big in the 90s for his rapid fire one-liners and frantic stage presence, similar to that of an early Robin Williams. He tended to do upwards of 100 one-liners back-to-back, but the following video is only a ten-gag segment chosen for brevity and because of the nostalgic look of a young Downtown smoking cigarettes on set.

The gag in question appears to have been called “Mayuge Booon!” which translates to “Eyebrows Boing!” implying perhaps the cartoonish image of eyes popping out when one is especially surprised.

It certainly seemed to be his kind of thing so I headed over to the archives of YouTube, but after watching a full 108-gag blitz he never mentioned “Mayuge Booon!” or “unkopuuun” once. Elsewhere online there does appear to be a song or audio file called “Mayuge Booon!” in existence and it is accredited to Yoshida, but it was always on some obscure audio media platform like Konami, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to sign up for one of those.

So, without any hard evidence to present to the judge, I’d have to resort to old-fashioned rhetoric as a defense tactic. Due to the high-profile nature of this case, the trial was closed to the media, so here is a word-for-word reenactment of my opening statement.

It was soon after Tina Turner had my client killed by a crossbow that I remembered I wasn’t a public defender at all but merely a writer for SoraNews24, and that wasn’t the DA who called me this morning but my landlord telling me I was late with the rent again.

Luckily, the court had mercy on me when it turned out that both the presiding judge and arresting officer were also mistakenly impersonating their roles. In fact none of us were even in a courthouse to begin with. It was just an owl cafe the whole time, so we all went home.

It sure is hot out these days.

Source: Kobe Shimbun, Hachima Kiko
Photos ©SoraNews24
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