61-year-old taken into custody after being judged flight risk.
Much has been written, and many hands wrung, over the opaque, obtuse, and obfuscating etiquette of the Japanese culture. In reality, though, for foreign tourists traveling in Japan, common sense will get you pretty far. Say please and thank you. If you’re stopping somewhere to check a map or dig through your bag, move to the side of the walkway so other people can get by. Refrain from humping in broad daylight at religious sites.
But apparently that last local manners point was a bit too hard for a 61-year-old Austrian tourist to adhere to, and was a social norm a Japanese female acquaintance of his was willing to break as well. At 11:35 in the morning on August 23, the police in the town of Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, received a call reporting that two people were having sex on the grounds of a shrine. Though the shrine isn’t in a heavily populated area, the witness reported that the pair was engaged in the act in an open, easily seen location.
It’s worth noting that, especially outside of big cities, it can sometimes be kind of hard to determine the exact boundaries of a shrine’s grounds. With Shinto’s roots in the deification of nature, shrines are often located in forests or on mountainsides, and smaller or older shrines often consist of little more than a free-standing torii gate and a shed-sized structure containing a small altar, with no surrounding fences or walls to designate where the shrine’s territory starts and stops. So, theoretically, you could have a scenario in which two consenting adults, with either a sense of urgency or adventure, decided to get it on in the woods without knowing they were within a shrine’s boundaries.
That doesn’t appear to have been the case in the Kesennuma incident, however, as the witness says the Austrian man was leaning against the shrine building while engaged in the act.
This seems like a good time to remind everyone that, conceptually, Japan is well aware of the fact that sometimes people have a sudden need for a place to have sex, and in fact there’s an entire industry for it, with “love hotels” that rent out rooms at reasonable hourly rates. A quick Google search turns up at least two in Kesennuma.
▼ Hotel Prince offers two-hour packages on weekdays starting at just 3,300 yen (US$22.30)
▼ And if two hours just isn’t enough time, Carol and Kujira has weekday packages where you and your special someone/convenient warm and willing body can stay from 6 in the morning to 5 in the evening for 4,600 yen
The pair now face charges of disrespecting a place of worship, with the woman, a Kesennuma resident in her 40s, already admitting guilt. The man, on the other hand, has said that he would make a statement until he had a lawyer present, and being deemed a flight risk, has been placed under arrest and taken into custody.
Source: Miya Tele, Yahoo! Japan News/Sendai Housou, FNN Prime Online, TBS News Dig
Top image: Pakutaso
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