There’s some excellent security camera footage, and for a very weird reason.

August 13 should have been a pretty chill time in Japan. Most of the country was still on vacation for the Obon holiday, which is typically celebrated by going back to your home town and relaxing and reminiscing with family. In terms of stay-home entertainment, anime production house Studio Ghibli was tweeting out behind-the-scenes secrets from the production of Princess Mononoke, and there was also the streaming release of the final Evangelion film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time.

But August 13 was also a Friday the 13th, and so it was perhaps inevitable that some weird stuff was going to go on. In the suburbs of Kyoto, one man who’d been out during the day returned home to find that a mysterious bag that had been left on his front doorstep. Looking inside, he found a pile of knives, and even freakier, nearly a dozen of the blades were stained with a gruesome-looking red liquid.

It turns out that earlier in the evening another man, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, had strolled up to the house and left the bag there, as shown in the video here.

In total, 17 knives, including both cooking knives and the cleaver-like Japanese hatchets called nata, were bundled inside the plastic bag. Upon examination the 11 red knives were found to be colored with paint, not blood, but still, that only downgrades the situation from really, really, really freaky to really, really freaky.

▼ A nata (not one from the Kyoto incident)

But the freakiness level gets boosted back up again with the fact that the owner of the house has no idea who the knife man is. “I have no idea what’s going on,” the owner says after watching the security camera footage. “I’ve never seen him in the neighborhood, and he’s not someone I’ve had contact with at work either. I’ve never seen him before in my life.”

If you’re wondering why there’s not one, but two excellent angles of security camera footage covering the home’s entrance, it’s because the homeowner himself installed them. That level of caution is sort of unusual in relatively low-crime Japan, but he made the decision to install the cameras two years ago, following an incident in which…someone left a bag of knives on his front step.

Given the extremely strange and specific dumping, it seems incredibly likely that both bags of knives were left by the same person. As if the nebulously threatening littering isn’t bad enough, the man also pulled out a can of red spray paint and left a line down the side of the homeowner’s car before leaving the scene.

In a final bit of oddity, the knife man was wearing a glove on his right hand as he carried the bag, but also used his ungloved left hand when setting it down. As a result, he may have left identifying fingerprints, and the police are currently searching for him on charges of vandalism and violating the Firearms and Sword Control Law.

Source: Yahoo! Japan News/Tele Asa News via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso
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