Weird crime could lead to seriously dangerous results.

Tottori Prefecture’s Daisen-Oki National Park is one of the most beautiful places in western Japan, offering visitors amazing views of mountains and forests. Bizarrely, though, this month the scenery has repeatedly featured huge amounts of dumped bread.

On August 14, National Parks Foundation workers discovered 30 loaves of bread that had been dumped along a 150-meter (492-foot) stretch of road that runs through the park. That might sound like the result of improperly secured cargo falling off a delivery truck, but the loaves were unwrapped, suggesting that they weren’t on their way to supermarkets or other retailers.

▼ As is the cultural norm in Japan, the collected evidence of suspected wrongdoing was arranged and photographed with care after being collected.

What happened next makes it even more unlikely that this was an accident, as loaves of bread were found dumped elsewhere along the road the next day, and the day after that, and then again on August 20. On those four days, maintenance workers picked up 80 loaves of bread from the side of the road, with a total weight of roughly 39 kilograms (86 pounds).

The repeated nature and large quantities might have one imagining that there’s a local bakery that’s tossing out the loaves that get screwed up during baking and aren’t fit for sale, but the abandoned loaves don’t appear to be malformed or otherwise obvious production failures. The discovery of 1.3 kilograms of dumped chicken livers and gizzards along the road on August 19 also suggests that this isn’t just a simple case of a bakery not wanting to pay for waste removal and deciding to litter the forest with bread instead.

Things get stranger still, as people on Tottori’s Hakuto Coastline, about an hour away from Daisen-Oki National Park by car, have also been finding loaves of bread dumped on the shore and in parking lots this month.

Now, if this were all taking place in a fairy tale world, where little children need to leave trails of bread to help them find their way home from an enchanted forest, there wouldn’t be cause for concern. In our real world, though, there are multiple problems that can come about from leaving large quantities of food waste in roadside and seaside areas. After enough time passes, the food will start to decay, becoming a smelly eyesore that’s also a health and sanitation issue.

Even before that happens, the food also has the potential to draw wild animals closer to human spaces, which can be dangerous for both people and the animals themselves. The Hakuto Coastline is a popular tourist destination, and anything that lures animals closer to roadways increases the possibility of accidents, either from them being struck by passing cars or motorists swerving crashing after swerving to avoid the wildlife. There have also been recent bear sightings near where the bread was dumped in Daisen-Oki National Park. With bear attacks having become increasingly common in Japan recently, the park’s administration, understandably, doesn’t want anyone dumping something that could attract the omnivores closer to roadways, and in response police have been stepping up patrols in the areas where bread has been found in an attempt to find who’s responsible, or at least dissuade them from continuing this bizarre behavior.

Source: FNN Prime Online, Yomiuri Shimbun, Nihonkai TV
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