As a follow-up to my post the other day about how non-crime-riddled Japan is, here’s an interesting/amusing story that popped up on the news the other day.
A fellow called Hirofumi Muto (51 years old – whether they like it or not, pretty much everyone who appears in the Japanese media has their age disclosed to the world at large) has been arrested on a charge of stealing a bicycle.
The police stopped him for questioning earlier this year and found that the bike he was riding, which was worth about 30,000 yen (150 GBP) had been stolen in May 2024. When they searched his house, however, they found a grand total of more than 50 others, none of which he appeared to have acquired legitimately.
Of course, stealing 50 bikes is quite an undertaking, particularly for a lone thief, but the thing that really amazes me about this story is how the hell he managed to stash them “within the grounds of his residence,” as the same news story on Yahoo! describes it, without any nosy neighbours getting suspicious. One assumes he either has a big-ish garden with a high fence around it or an absolutely massive garage.
If you were doing this in the west, your ultimate objective would be to sell the bikes on via Ebay or similar, but something tells me this guy was just a compulsive bicycle thief, although he claims to be a filmmaker by profession, so perhaps he needed them for a Japanese remake of The Bicycle Thieves?
