But it wasn’t naked people that they wanted to watch.

In addition to men’s and women’s rooms, in Japan you’ll often see a third category of public restroom, an example of which is pictured above. Inside these you’ll find only a single toilet, but the layout is spacious enough to accommodate users who need a wheelchair, crutches, or walking stick for mobility, and the room is outfitted with support rails, child seats, and large changing tables. They’re designed to accommodate not only physically handicapped or elderly users, but also parents with small children and caretakers who are accompanying adults with special needs.

In Japanese, the rooms are called “tamokuteki toire,” which translates literally to “multipurpose restroom.” However, those purposes are all still supposed to be more or less poop or pee-related, so people passing through Tokyo’s Harajuku Station on one day last June were surprised to hear the sounds of passionate love-making coming from behind the door of the facility’s multipurpose restroom.

▼ Harajuku Station

The sound continued for five uninterrupted minutes, during which time someone informed the station staff, who came to investigate. If you’re thinking that it should be very hard to find a sexual partner enticed by the offer to get it on inside a pubic bathroom of one of Japan’s busiest train stations, you’ll be relieved to know that it turned out no one was exchanging bodily fluids in the room meant for deposits of human waste. Instead, it was the work of a 26-year-old man who was playing the sound from a porno video inside the restroom on a speaker with the sound cranked up.

While this might sound like a strange ploy for the man’s personal sexual gratification, the driving force behind the incident were actually some of man’s other great desires: money and/or fame. Following the discovery of the speaker, a camera was found in the hallway outside the restroom. It turns out the 26-year-old, who was working with a 23-year-old accomplice, is an aspiring YouTuber and was planning to upload a video to the platform of the shocked reactions of passersby who heard the sounds of humping emanating from the bathroom.

Instead of getting Internet famous, though, the pair have now been officially charged by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police with violation of public nuisance ordinances, which both men have admitted to. The video they recorded was also confiscated on the spot, and thus won’t be being uploaded to YouTube or any other video streaming service.

In hindsight, it seems like the YouTuber’s plan was doomed to end up with him getting caught, but maybe he was counting on the tendency many Japanese people have to not get involved when they see something unusual going on, and figured enough people would react but not tell anyone about the sounds for them to get the footage they wanted, collect their camera, and make their getaway before the authorities got involved. Things didn’t turn out that way, though, and now they’re getting an embarrassing reminder of an important rue of comedy: if you’re going to make someone feel uncomfortable for laughs, you should be the one feeling uncomfortable.

Source: NHK News Web
Top image: Wikipedia/Oka21000
Insert image: Wikipedia/江戸村のとくぞう
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