He did the one thing you shouldn’t do if you don’t want your idol merch to go up in smoke.
When putting out your trash in Japan, you always have to be conscious of what you’re putting out on burnable garbage day. One reason for this is Japan’s complex recyclable classification system, which requires residents to sort their glass, plastic, metal, and paper items separately. The other reason, though, is that once you put something out as burnable trash, there’s probably no hope of ever getting it back.
As an example of that second point, consider the case of Takehiro Tsutsumi, a 45-year-old idol otaku living in the town of Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Like a lot of idol singer fans, Tsutsumi purchases merchandise from artists he admires, but back in early October he threw out a T-shirt for one of his favorite groups, on burnable trash day, only to later try to reclaim it.
He managed to deduce that his home’s burnable trash gets taken to an incineration center in Osaka City’s Nishiyodogawa district, so he contacted the facility and told them “I want you to return the female idol group T-shirt I threw away.” Unfortunately for Tsutsumi, the incineration center staff had been working efficiently and the delivery batch that included his idol shirt was now nothing but smoke and ashes, and the center informed him that they were unable to return it.
▼ They burned the burnable trash? What were the odds?!?
In contrast to the speedy incineration, Tsutsumi’s anger appears to have simmered over the next several weeks. Finally, on December 1 he took to social media, but not to ask the group to reissue the shirts or to see if a fellow fan had a spare they’d be willing to part with. Instead, he posted a message saying “The Nishiyodogawa Incineration Center will explode in two hours.”
Maybe there would have been a time when the message would have been dismissed as the inconsequential blathering of an angry Internet troll, but in the post-Kyoto Animation arson attack climate, the incineration center wasn’t going to take any chances, so the facility was quickly evacuated. The subsequent investigation led the authorities to Tsutsumi, and though the lack of any explosives found at the facility suggests the idol fan had been making an idle threat, on Monday he was arrested on charges of forced obstruction of business activities.
It’s not clear what turn of events caused Tsutsumi to go from throwing the T-shirt in the trash, and on burnable garbage day no less, to wanting it back so desperately that he’d threaten to blow up a building. Maybe he threw it away by accident, or maybe he momentarily felt like one of the idols had broken his heart and wanted to cut emotional ties, only for his infatuation to recover the next day. Either way, his stupidity serves a reminder to all of us not to make threats of large-scale violence, but also to think twice about if we’re really ready to part with whatever we’re putting in our burnable trash.
Source: The Sankei News via Hachima Kiko
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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