Leave the three-blade techniques to One Piece’s Zoro.

What’s the appropriate number of knives to be holding? It’s a question for which the answer really depends on the circumstances. If, for instance, you’re in the process of shampooing your hair or playing basketball, you probably don’t want to be holding any knives. However, there are a lot of activities for which having one knife is perfectly appropriate, such as if you’re cooking a meal or whittling woodwork. Two knives? Things are getting questionable there, but maybe there are some high-level situations where you can achieve greater efficiency in your culinary or crafting plans by using two different blades in tandem.

But I think we can all agree that once you get up to holding three knives at once, you’re probably going to start attracting negative attention, especially if, since you’re out of hands, you decide to hold one in your mouth, like a man in Japan’s Saga Prefecture did last weekend.

Last Sunday morning a call came in to the emergency police 110 line from a woman in the town of Karatsu, who said she’d seen a man walking along the road carrying a knife in each hand. While the transportation of bladed instruments, in and of itself, isn’t illegal in Japan, the expectation is that knives are to be secured/stowed when in transit. Police officers were dispatched to the neighborhood where the man was seen, and at around 8:40 a.m. they found him, now not only holding knives in both hands, but with a third clenched between his teeth.

As shown in the video above, the three blades, with lengths of 13.5, 17, and 18 centimeters (5.3. 6.7, and 7.1 inches) appeared to be cooking knives, with the man holding the third knife in his mouth by the handle, which is slightly less suspicious-looking than if he’d had the blade itself in his mouth. Nevertheless, the police, understandably, wanted to know what sort of plans he had that required him to have more knives than hands. After either removing the third knife from his mouth or perhaps just speaking very carefully, the man told the officers:

“I’m on my way to an acquaintance’s house to get some vegetables.”

It’s worth noting that the Japanese phrase the man used, yasai wo tori ni , can mean to “get vegetables,” “harvest vegetables,” or “take vegetables.” Going through those possibilities, knives aren’t usually required to “get,” in the sense of “receive,” things, and for harvesting vegetables, shovels tend to be much more useful than bladed instruments. Knives, of course, can be effective tools for “taking” things, but only if you’re taking them through the threat of violence, which the police tend to frown on.

Really, the only good reason to be walking around with a bladed instrument gripped in your mouth is if you are, in fact, Roronoa Zoro. Unfortunately for the three-knife man, the police determined that he is not pirate anime One Piece’s master swordsman, and is instead an unemployed 47-year-old local resident. As such, it was felt that he had no lawfully appropriate reason to be brandishing the blades in public, and he has been placed under arrest on suspicion of violating Japan’s Sword and Firearm Control Law.

Source: Teleasa News via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin, Saga Shimbun, RKB Mainichi Hoso
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