Featured

crime (Page 60)

When a goddess speaks, you listen…unless she’s telling you to kill someone

Criminals have to come up with some pretty extravagant excuses for why they commit crimes. Sometimes, their reasons are really out there. Take the Oscar Pistorius case, for example. He acknowledges that he fired the shots that killed his girlfriend, but claims that he thought he was protecting her from a possible intruder. It’s then up to the courts to determine whether or not the defense’s theory holds any water. But what do you do when the working theory is, “Amaterasu, the sun goddess, told me to kill my mother.”

Read More

U.K. man sentenced for prohibited images of ‘manga’ children

The Teesside Crown Court of Middlesbrough, England convicted 39-year-old Robul Hoque of 10 counts of possessing prohibited images of children. However, the children depicted in the images were all drawings. Hoque is believed to be the first man in the country brought to court solely over manga and anime images. The court sentenced him to nine months in prison, but the sentence will be suspended if Hoque maintains good behavior and follows the court’s requirements for two years.

Read More

Three Chinese men arrested in Japan for buying too many diapers

In recent years a scourge has gripped Japan, and it is people buying too many disposable diapers at once – the Merries brand in particular. For this heinous behavior, three Chinese men were arrested by the Hyogo Prefectural Police on 15 October and are expected to be deported back to their country.

Read More

Biker assaulted by iron bar-wielding Nara innkeeper, not the other way around

The are many pleasant sights and sounds to be found around Japan. One of the most famous is the exaggerated revving of groups of motorbike engines at all hours of the day and night. They’re often referred to as bosozoku which although often translated as “biker gangs” can be misleading as that would imply the use of at least somewhat cool bikes. Bosozoku kids, contrastingly, often ride scooters customized for peak annoyance of all those around, and some of them don’t actually ride their bikes at all.

Despite efforts by law enforcement, this trend continues all over Japan. So it comes as no surprise when people take the law into their own hands. In the case of one Nara resident, “the law” came in the form of an iron bar which he used to break the knee of an allegedly noisy biker.

Read More

Police officer arrested for assaulting 2 train station attendants in Saitama

Saitama prefectural police said Monday that a 54-year-old police officer has been arrested after he assaulted two train station attendants.

Read More

Osaka Station showered with photos of a teenage boy, two train otaku questioned by police

On the evening of 19 September, JR Osaka Station became the scene of unseasonable weirdness as dozens of photographs of an unknown teenage boy seen sitting on the train fell from the sky like giant snowflakes of randomness.

Upon investigating the incident, Osaka Prefectural Police found this to have been an act of revenge by what is fast becoming Japan’s most oddball sub-culture: train otaku.

Read More

Own a pair of secret camera shoes? The police should be by shortly for a visit

For most of this summer, Kyoto Prefectural Police have been carrying out an aggressive campaign of going to people’s homes and asking them to voluntarily give up their shoes with built-in hidden cameras. These house calls have resulted in hundreds of pairs of these “tosatsu shoes” (voyeur shoes) winding up in police custody.

This plan to deter the use of tosatsu shoes to illegally film in private areas such as up women’s skirts had proved so successful that police in Kyoto are spreading the word to other departments and will continue the same tactics in the future.

Read More

The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus went on sale last Friday, and we were pretty psyched. In fact, our very own Mr. Sato was so excited about the launch that he was, once again, first in line to get his hands on the latest version of Apple’s smartphone, and we’re sure others in the U.S. and Hong Kong felt just as happy with their new purchases.

Not everyone in the world got to be in on the fun, though. Apple is staggering the launch of the iPhone 6, and while Japan was lucky enough to be in the first batch of territories where it has become available, mainland China wasn’t. This has led to some extra cash for iPhone resellers, as well as customs officials who spent the weekend steadily confiscating smuggled iPhones.

Read More

19-year-old youth stabs parents; mother dies

Police in Kumagaya, Saitama Prefecture, on Tuesday arrested a 19-year-old youth after he stabbed his parents at their home. The suspect’s mother later died of her wounds.

Read More

Japanese high schooler fails driver’s license test 20 times, tries to hire someone else to take it for him

How far would you go to pass a test? At all points in our life, tests determine whether we succeed or fail with little remorse for how much grueling effort actually went into studying for it. One test in Japan is extremely taxing and foreigners and Japanese alike shudder at even the thought of taking it. We are talking about the Japanese driver’s license test and one first year high school student from Fukuoka who had failed the written portion 20 times, finally resorted to cheating in order to try and pass it.

Read More

Video showing convenience store workers being forced to kowtow to thugs leads to one arrest

In Japan, particularly online, you may come across the term DQN (dokyun). It’s a label reserved for those at the lowest order of intelligence and social graces and those who rank in the highest percentile for violence and general douchebag behavior.

Catching one of these creatures in their natural habitat of the streets is a rare but obnoxious treat. That’s why it’s awfully nice of them to record their own anti-social behavior so that we may study their ways in the comfort of our own home, and so the authorities can arrest and prosecute them all the more easily.

Take alleged DQN Tsuyoshi Nakamura for example, who along with some associates stands accused of harassing, threatening, and extorting from the entire staff of a FamilyMart convenience store in Ibaraki, Osaka. Nakamura is also under suspicion of forcing them to get on their knees and bow in apology, with the entire scene being uploaded to YouTube for all to see.

Read More

Kamen Rider stuntman applies skills to thievery

Yasutomo Ihara, a former stuntman known for his participation in the Kamen Rider franchise, has since turned his training to nefarious ends. In a story seemingly grafted from a J-drama, he was arrested on September 8 by Saitama Prefecture’s Criminal Investigations Unit for 43 separate counts of theft. His method involved scaling walls by slipping his fingers into tiny indentations and entering houses through their second-floor windows, earning him the nickname “Spiderman” from the investigators. His targets were in the neighboring Saitama Prefecture cities of Warabi and Toda.

Read More

With Japan’s relatively lenient attitudes towards sex and violence in cartoons, you might get the impression that the whole society has come to a consensus that anime artists can draw whatever they like. That’s not always the case, though, and in recent years a string of crimes committed by individuals with an obsessive love for animation and comics has rekindled the debate about how much, if any, legal control should be placed on anime content.

It’s no shock that a former manga artist and adult video director has spoken out in opposition to such regulation. What is surprising, though, is his pick for the creator of the most detrimental anime: Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki.

Read More

Don’t point that camera at me! Man arrested for taking “normal” picture on train

Japanese people love to take pictures. Whenever you see them on vacation, no matter if it’s their first time or their thousandth time, they are always taking them. In fact, Japan was one of the first countries to sell mobile phones equipped with a camera back in 2000. Having a camera on you at all times sure does come in handy, as you’ll always be able to capture that special moment wherever you are.

Unfortunately, sometimes that special moment is a peep-shot or a scandalous photo which is certainly a violation of privacy. Japan has taken a very no-nonsense approach to help stop these highly inappropriate photos, and it comes in the form of the Anti-Nuisance Ordinance. So powerful is this law that the latest person to be arrested has caused a bit of commotion. His crime? Taking a picture of a fully-clothed woman sitting beside him on the train.

Read More

30 Okayama schools get postcards threatening to kidnap students

Police in Kurashiki, Okayama Prefecture, said Saturday that at least 30 elementary schools received postcards this week, in which the sender threatened to kidnap a child.

Read More

Policeman throws up after questioning a suspect who hadn’t brushed his teeth in a year

There is a Chinese idiom based on the ancient military strategies of China: “Of the thirty-six stratagems, the best is to flee”. However, if you can’t flee, and have your hands held down, what would you do? If you haven’t been brushing your teeth for a year, you might have a chance at distracting your enemy with your breath.

We don’t really want to know how bad that smells, but apparently, a man who was recently arrested in Hebei, China, managed to make a police officer throw up because of his foul breath.

Read More

Guide dog stabbed while walking with owner

Police in Saitama Prefecture are looking for the person who stabbed a guide dog while it was with its 61-year-old visually-impaired owner in Saitama.

Read More

Visiting the South Pole and 14 other lesser known crimes in Japan

Every country or district has their share of obscure crimes tucked deep in dusty long-forgotten law books. Archaic prohibitions on tying your horse to a dog or refusing to salute your teachers can be found everywhere. The following 15 laws however, are not outdated and many of us have probably done them at some point in our lives without realizing that in some cases it could land us in a Japanese prison.

Read More

Train groper escapes along tracks at Ebisu station in Tokyo

A man suspected of groping a woman on the JR Yamanote line escaped by jumping onto the tracks at JR Ebisu station in Tokyo on Thursday night. His actions delayed trains along the Yamanote line for about 30 minutes, TBS reported Friday.

Read More

For the most part, Japan is an extremely safe country. Still, that doesn’t mean the country is completely crime-free, with convenience stores being one of the most likely targets of individuals who’ve been driven to extreme measures by their desire for cash (or a light snack).

Occasionally these crimes are diffused by clerks who are quick-thinking, daring, or possibly deliberately obtuse. On the occasion that a robbery does go down, however, victims in Japan do have one last resort: chucking a giant paint ball at the criminal.

Read More

  2. 1
  3. ...
  4. 57
  5. 58
  6. 59
  7. 60
  8. 61
  9. 62
  10. 63
  11. ...
  12. 69