No criminal charges will be filed.

When entering a preschool in Japan, you’re supposed to take your shoes off. Just like at a Japanese home, the idea is that the soles of your shoes have undoubtedly gotten dusty and dirty while walking around outside, and you don’t want to track all those unsightly, possibly unhygienic debris into the preschool’s interior.

That doesn’t mean preschoolers spend the day barefoot or in their stocking feet, though. At the entrance to the school, kids change into uwabaki, light slippers that are only worn indoors so they stay clean.

▼ Uwabaki for sale for 398 yen (US$2.60) a pair

Rather than have kids lug their uwabaki to and from school every day, many preschools have dedicated cubby boxes in their entryways where kids can store their slippers overnight. However, this convenience turned into an uneasy situation at Gogasho Preschool in the town of Koga, Fukuoka Prefecture, earlier this month, as on November 6 it was discovered that a number of children’s slippers had been stolen during the night, with some of the stolen footwear later found scattered about other parts of the school or in its garden. The thief then struck again the next night bringing the total number of victims to 13 children.

Uwabaki are not expensive, costing only a few hundred yen (a few US dollars) for a pair, so there’s not much money, if any, to be made reselling them to thrifty shoppers who don’t want to pay full price for a new pair at the store. That leaves the only possible motives for a person to steal them as either a prank of mischievous or malicious intent or, even more troubling, an unbalanced individual looking to satisfy a disturbing fetish.

Gogasho Preschool contacted the local police and reported the thefts, and investigators, taking the matter seriously, decided to set up a surveillance camera in the school’s entryway, with its lens pointed towards the slipper cubbies. And sure enough, just a few days later, on November 12, they captured video footage of the weasel in the act, which can be seen in the video below.

And no, I didn’t call the thief a “weasel” out of revulsion, but because the thief is literally a weasel. Specifically, the culprit appears to be a Siberian weasel, a breed that has been known to be able to survive in residential areas, according to Hiroshi Sasaki, a professor of environmental ecology at Chikushi Jogakuen, a university located about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) from Gogasho Preschool.

But…why would a weasel want slippers? Sasaki says that the weasel’s fur isn’t thick enough to fully insulate the species’ babies from the winter cold, and that the culprit is likely pilfering Gogasho’s uwabaki to use in building a nest. A similar incident occurred in Aichi Prefecture two years ago, when a rash of sandal thefts lead to the items being recovered from a weasel nest, with the shape of the footwear apparently being attractive to the animals for such purposes.

So while the thief in the Gogasho case has been visually identified, no charges will be filed, on account of wild animals not having criminal culpability. The perpetrator is also still at large, so for the time being the school has placed protective netting over the cubbies to keep the kids’ slippers safe.

Source: FBS via Livedoor News via Jin
Top image: Wikipedia/トトト
Insert images: Wikipedia/Nesnad
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