Local residents thought a robbery was in progress when they saw police cars outside the bank, but something even more unexpected was going on.

For the most part, Japan is a very safe country. However, there is still a universal police emergency phone number, 110, and at approximately 12:15 in the afternoon on April 27, a call came in reporting an intruder at a bank in the town of Kashiwazaki, Niigata Prefecture.

The intruder had entered the Kashiwazaki Higashi branch of regional bank Daishi Hokuetsu through the ATM area, and was refusing to leave the building. Police were dispatched to the scene, and when some locals saw squad cars converging on the building, they thought a robbery might be in progress. It wasn’t a thief who was inside the building, though, but a deer.

▼ The Kashiwazaki Higashi Daishi Hokuetsu bank

With a population of roughly 74,000 people, Kashiwazaki isn’t a bustling metropolis, but neither is it a bucolic village. The bank which the deer had found its way into is just a few blocks from Kashiwazaki Station, on a fairly developed street where wild animals aren’t a common sight, with one nearby shopkeeper saying she’d never seen a deer in that part of town before.

As the deer had made no demands of the bank tellers, the incident was not treated as an attempted robbery by the police. However, even after being given ample time to make any legitimate withdrawals from the ATM, the animal remained in the building, and so some sort of response was needed. While hunting organizations are often called on in Japan to cull potentially dangerous wild animals such as bears and boars who wander into human-inhabited areas, the deer was deemed to be a lesser threat, as no injuries had been sustained by bank staff or customers during their evacuation from the building. So instead, the deer was subdued with a tranquilizer dart, with the administrator forgoing a rifle and instead choosing the much more awesomely old-school method of propelling the dart through a blowgun, as seen in the video below.

The incident follows another unexpected deer sighting which took place in Aichi Prefecture on April 25, when a deer was spotted on the campus of Nagoya University.

Taken together, these occurrences would seem to suggest that we’re on the cusp of a period of upward social mobility for deer in Japan, as they seek increased access to financial services and higher education. However, the Kashiwazaki administration is taking the stance that bank access is still for humans only, and announced that the tranquilized deer would be returned to its traditional natural habitat in the mountains.

Source: TBS News Dig, YouTube/メ〜テレニュース
Top image: Pakutaso
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