Thin strip of cloth is a thin excuse in the eyes of the law.

At around 5:30 p.m. last Wednesday, a young woman was riding an escalator in a shopping center in Okayama City’s Kita Ward. That should be about as mundane as a weekday evening scene can get, but the escalator ride had a sudden twist as the man in front of the woman suddenly pulled down his pants and gave her an eyeful of his butt cheeks.

Of course, the problem with butt-flashing someone on an escalator is that everyone knows where you’re going: to the top of the escalator. Well, there’s also the problem of the moral reprehensibleness of flashing someone in general, but in any case, doing it on an escalator makes escape difficult. Sure enough, a security guard apprehended the man, later identified as a 44-year-old office worker who lives in the city’s Higashi Ward. The security guard then called the police, delivering the succinct report of “I have a suspicious person in custody.”

The woman is described as being “judai,” a Japanese term describing someone between the age of 10 and 19, though with reports not referring to her as a child, she’s likely a teenager, and above the legal-adulthood age of 18.

Officers were promptly dispatched to the scene, but during questioning the man partly denied the accusations. He’s not contesting that he pulled down his pants with the explicit purpose of showing the woman what was underneath, but he’s contesting that he didn’t expose his posterior, as he was wearing undergarments. In explaining his motives to the police, the man said “It was not my intention to show her my butt. I wanted a young woman to see the T-back underwear I was wearing.”

As such, the man could perhaps contend that he didn’t expose his butt, as he was, technically, still wearing something under his pants. That said, depending on the design of the underwear and the voluminousness of the man’s butt cheeks, it’s possible that the T-back was burrowed far enough his crack as to be materially the same as exposing a completely bare backside. And if you’re of the opinion that even flashing your T-backed butt to an unwilling stranger should be illegal, you’ll be happy to know that the man was still arrested on charges of violating Okayama’s Nuisance Prevention Ordinance.

▼ “Your butt is a severe enough nuisance that it violates the law” is among the more uniquely damning indictments the legal system can make against an individual.

It’s worth pointing out that while Japan does have a tradition of men wearing loincloths, which also provide only scant coverage of the lower body, such attire is generally reserved for traditional festivals and the lapsed Men of SoraNews24 charity calendar, situations/publications where people are mentally prepared for the possibility of seeing some cheek. Dropping trou on unsuspecting shoppers, on the other hand, will get you in trouble with the law even more quickly than carrying around Harry Potter’s Sword of Gryffindor.

Source: KSB Setonaikai Broadcasting via Hachima Kiko, RSK Sanyo Broadcasting, Sanyo Shimbun
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