Cops arrest senior citizen who vandalized shrine one day after arriving in Japan with family.

On Monday, American Steve Hayes arrived in Japan with three of his family members for a sightseeing trip. The next day, the family visited Meiji Shrine, downtown Tokyo’s largest Shinto shrine, which is conveniently located next to Harajuku Station.

It’s very much a standard tourist place to visit, but there’s nothing wrong with that. What is wrong, though, is to vandalize the place while you’re there, which is what Hayes did when he decided to, using his fingernail, carve his family’s name into a wooden torii gate on the shrine grounds.

▼ The torii that Hayes carved his family name into can be seen in the video here.

The incident brings to mind a case from last month when another American tourist visiting Japan was arrested on charges of setting multiple fires outside of homes in Tokyo. But whereas the accused arsonist was a teenager, Hayes is far too old for his stupidity to be ascribed to youth, as he’s 65-years-old.

It’s unlikely that when the family was putting together their Japan travel itinerary they included “Steve shows up on the news doing a perp walk on after being arrested,” but hey, it’s often the least expected travel experiences that end up being the ones you most remember.

Oh, and that video of Hayes being taken away? It was recorded at around 4:30 in the morning, showing that the police felt the offense was serious enough to arrest him ASAP. He’s being charged with property damage, and when questioned by police admitted to carving his family name into the torii.

There are a couple of cultural things that this serves as a good opportunity to address. When visiting shrines in Japan (and all of this applies to Japanese temples too), some foreign tourists may find the atmosphere less reverential than what they’re used to at churches or other places of worship in their home country or elsewhere in the world. In day-to-day life, Japanese society is pretty secular, and shrines/temples in downtown areas can sometimes feel as much like parks or tourist attractions as they do religious sites. Streets and pedestrian paths leading up to shrines are often lined with tourism-related facilities such as snack shops and souvenir stores, and since such accommodations for travelers (including Japanese domestic travelers) have been the norm in Japan for centuries, one could, possibly, come away with the false impression that less-than-respectful treatment of shrine facilities will be tolerated.

That, however, is not the case at all. Even if one wanted to make the argument that Japan takes religion less seriously than other countries, Japan deeply values its history and culture, and it especially values being courteous and polite in public spaces. Vandalism, in any form, isn’t something that Japan is cool with, and with high-profile cases of inbound overseas tourists indulging in jackassery while in Japan occurring with increasing frequency, there’s decidedly less likelihood of foreigners getting a pass for bad behavior these days.

And finally, if you are going to do something this stupid, at least man up and write just your given name, not your family’s, to avoid giving the impression that your relatives are as a big a ditz as you are.

Source: FNN Prime Online, Teleasa News
Top image: Wikipedia/Magnus Manske
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