Last week we did a story about a guy, a ramen shop owner, who called the police and said he’d
been robbed at the end of the day of a certain amount of money, and then it turns out he had
not been robbed. He’d set this up himself, and I thought that’s sort of a weird one -off story,
which is why it attracted my interest. Then two weeks later we have a multitude of stories.
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It’s almost, I’m wondering if it’s copycats, but then the news that we get is usually like a couple
weeks after the initial crime. Like one of the stories is from the end of February, it’s now
basically the middle of April. Is it a copycat? Because I’m pretty sure the people who are doing
the same thing didn’t read the news. And then also why would you copycat a crime that didn’t work?
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That’s actually a really interesting aspect of this because I’m seeing a bunch of these stories
all of a sudden. So we have a 54…
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Let’s get started. We have a 50 year old…
We have a 54 year old civil servant who bound his own hands and feet to mimic being robbed. He said
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two men pointed something like a knife at him after he left home and they stole 800 ,000 yen that
he had on him. He was driven away and found seven hours later, but they could not find any suspects.
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He claimed that both suspects were in their 30s and 40s. God damn, I’m having a rough start.
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He claimed that both suspects were in their 30s, 175 milli… God damn it.
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Let’s start again.
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He claimed both…
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He claimed both suspects were in their 30s, 175 centimeters tall. They wore dark clothes and hats
and masks. So this is the first problem is if that’s the description, this is kind of like the
vague description they did last week. You can’t find that person. So you’re giving them a description
but no actual details. So a description of no actual details means they’re just making it so
that this is really hard to find the people that they’re looking for. 175 meters… 175… 175
centimeters is sort of the average height of a Japanese person. No facial features because
they’re wearing masks and wearing all black. That’s a lot of people every single day.
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He was arrested for obstructing police operations and they currently don’t know why he do it. So
this is it. Like do you get the money back? If you’ve had the money stolen from you,
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I guess maybe they might have insurance of some sort. That might be the only way to get out of
this. I’m trying to think where the profit is in this. So for the ramen guy, his store probably had
robbery insurance of some sort. So maybe he could get money that way. But this guy, if it’s like his
personal funds, that isn’t insured. So it’s not like you’re actually going to get it back.
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A 24 -year -old woman claimed someone broke into her house and stole her wallet, but there were no signs of a
break -in. So there’s your first problem is if you’re going to fake a crime, you have to actually
fake the details of a crime. Now, maybe you don’t know what those are, which is again, our guy from
the ramen restaurant last night was like searching on chat GPT on his phone, like how to fake a robbery.
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This woman didn’t even put that much effort into it. She just called the police and said she’d been
robbed. Someone broke into her house, but there was no signs of forced entry into her house. So then
the police found the wallet that she claimed had been stolen. So not only did she not fake the crime
properly, the thing that was supposed to be stolen, she didn’t even like get rid of it or hide it or do
anything with it. So the police found it while they were searching her place. A 31 -year -old claimed he
was attacked, slashed with something like a box cutter, knives being difficult. Knives are illegal to
carry in Japan. So box cutters are not, which is why if you watch a Japanese movie, you’ll actually see
people attacking each other with box cutters fairly often because that’s an easy weapon to get a hold
of in Japan. If you want to turn it into a weapon, he claimed he was slashed with something like a box
cutter, but he had inflicted the wounds himself. Then a 37 -year -old man, this was from February 27th,
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ran into a police station and said he had been threatened with a gun. It’s a very rare thing to be
threatened with in Japan because guns are so hard to get a hold of. They took an envelope with 260 ,000 yen
cash in it. He said the attackers appeared to be foreign because they said, give me money.
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Security camera footage found no such individuals on the streets anywhere in the area. They couldn’t
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legitimately find anyone who even came close to the description he gave. There were no foreigners.
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Interesting side note, the number of crimes by foreigners in Japan has actually been going down
while the number of foreigners in Japan has been going up. So that’s an interesting ratio that has been
changing. So more people who are coming to Japan, but those people are committing less crimes overall.
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I do have a weird question. It’s like, what do you get out of this? So for the people who are,
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you know, pretending to be robbed, if they have robbery insurance, I guess they get money back.
So they’re trying to steal money. I kind of understand that one, but the people who are doing
it personally, what do they get out of it? Are they getting any sort of media attention? Are they,
they, but okay, I kind of said this last time, put a little work into it. You know, plan your crime
properly. If you’re going to say someone broke into your house, you got to make it look like
someone broke into your house. But with the amount of surveillance cameras in the world today,
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it is very unlikely you’re going to get away with it because every one of these has been busted by
the cops going, finding security footage in the area and not finding the suspect and then asking
them some hard questions and they’re not able to answer the questions and then they get caught.
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There was a survey done and it was the 10 most annoying things foreign tourists do on Japanese
trains. Now, so after going through this list, I thought I would go through my list of the 10 most
annoying things Japanese people do on trains. So number 10, coughing, sneezing without consideration.
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I actually think that’s pretty fair. Number nine, leaving trash behind. Japanese people are very
weirded out by garbage left on a chair where they’re supposed to sit. They don’t actually want to touch it.
I kind of get that. Number eight, other. Don’t know what that is, but any other stuff, I guess, fell into the
category of number eight. I guess nonspecifics that didn’t fit into the entire list. Number seven, sitting in
priority seats. Number six, bad manners when boarding or getting off. Number five, standing near the door
without moving. I think number six and number five are actually the exact same thing. So bad manners when
boarding or getting off, blocking the way. I think that’s what they’re trying to say. Number four, strong sense.
Number three, sitting style that encroaches others. I think they’re talking about man spreading more
than anything else. Number two, carrying and placement of luggage or bags and umbrellas. And
number one, noisy conversations and messing about. Now, if you’d like to know my top 10 list of things
Japanese people do that annoy me when I’m on the train, number 10 is coughing and sneezing without
consideration. Number nine is leaving behind trash. It’s very annoying. Number eight, it’s kind of a general
catch -all. Other is the one I put on my list. Number seven, sitting in priority seats when they’re not
supposed to or not getting up and offering their seats to other people. Number six, bad manners when
boarding or getting off the train. Number five, standing near the door without moving. Number four,
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strong sense. But I’m not talking about perfumes. I’m talking about strong personal body sense.
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Number three, sitting style that encroaches on others or blocking out space so that other people
can’t sit next to you. Probably the thing that annoys me the most is when someone, there’s two
seats and you sit on the outside so people can’t get on the inside or you put your bag there to block
other people from sitting down. Number two, carrying and placement of luggage bags or umbrellas. And
number one, noisy conversations and messing about. You know, Japanese people can complain about foreigners,
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but Japanese people also have to take a look at their own behavior before making those sort of
complaints. I have had kids. And so I understand that kids are frustrating and very difficult to deal
with. And punishing them can be difficult for finding a balance between being strict and, you know,
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those moments when you’re supposed to be kind. It’s always interesting, TV shows. They always know
when they’re supposed to get really tough with the kids and ground them. And then when they’re supposed
to like sort of be gentle and forgiving and that kind of stuff. It’s always difficult to tell.
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For me in movies, it’s always the leave me behind moment in movies. So you have the guy falls and he goes,
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leave me behind, you go without me. And then how do they know when leaving them behind is the right
thing to do or stopping and then like heroically saving them is the right thing to do? Because
there’s no criteria. It’s just a decision. Now in the movies, it’s always the right decision,
but I would like to see sooner or later sometime where the hero decides to like run away and leave
the person to die. And then they find out, well, that was totally the wrong thing to do. I could have
saved that guy like 10 times over. Or they like go to save the person when they’re not supposed to,
and they both die as a result. I mean, any of those scenarios I would like to see played out,
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this is a lower stakes version of that. When to know how to punish your kid and how harshly,
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but I, I tried to be strict and yet kind and understanding as often as I could. Some other
people maybe haven’t found that balance. And that’s how they end up on an episode of Ninja News Japan.
A mother and her boyfriend drove their eight -year -old child to the mountains and left him
there to discipline him. So this is like when people dump dogs or other animals, they drive
them out into the forest or the mountains, they let them out and then they just drive away.
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I cannot think of a more traumatizing thing you could do to a child than just dump them in the
mountains and act like you’re going to leave them there forever. The boy had better sense than I
would in that situation. He is eight years old. He sought help at a nearby camping facility,
which was one kilometer walk away. So he figured out, I guess, to follow a road. He followed it for
a kilometer. He found a camping place, the place where they probably reserve camping spots. He walked
in. He said, you know, I’m, my parents just dumped me in the mountains. Can you help me? The people,
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of course, can. They called the police. They called 110. The mother and boyfriend went back.
Uh, I think I didn’t write it down, but I think it was like 20 minutes later. They went back to go
get the kid. So they didn’t intend to abandon him there. But the problem is they did leave him there
with the kid, not knowing they were going to come back. So the kid had to start taking care of himself,
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which he did right away. He did the smart thing. He didn’t just stand there and cry.
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Uh, then when they got back, he was gone. So then they called 110 as well and said, Hey,
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we, uh, have sort of lost our kid, but I’m betting the kid actually was pretty honest about his story
with the people who like found him the first place at the camping thing. And he said to them,
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you know, my parents dumped me here. So the police know who they’re looking for. They call the police,
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the police show up, the parent and her boyfriend have now been arrested. So it’s almost like
discipline went two ways in that one. Not only was the child disciplined, but the parents are also
disciplined. I would like to see the parents very severely disciplined, just like the kid was.
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A viral video sort of hit the Japanese Twitter X, those kinds of things of a child tourist on the
Shibuya crossing. So the Shibuya crossing is that very famous crossing. It’s like five,
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six lanes, all cross and people, there’s a huge crowd of people go through the middle.
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You’ve seen it in a bunch of movies. It’s a pretty dramatic thing. I actually haven’t visited
because I don’t care for crowds, but that’s kind of the whole point of going there.
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We regularly get stories of YouTubers and stuff messing about in the middle of Shibuya crossing
because they’re blocking people. This one, you have a little girl. I think she’s from Taiwan is
one of the stories said there were a lot of stories about this and sort of the facts are a bit mixed up.
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The video is pretty clear. This is a very small girl, maybe eight, nine years old, super excited to
be at Shibuya crossing. Someone’s filming her. She’s sort of dancing around. She’s not really being in
anyone’s way and she’s not really in anyone’s way. A person walks up, clearly beelines towards the kid
and then shoulder checks the kid and knocks them over. There was no technical injury in this case,
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but I went to bengoshi .com where they had a discussion about this. Like what is the actual
charge? There was no injury. That is assault, a physical force towards another person. And that
can get you two years in prison and up to a 300 ,000 yen fine. If the child had fallen and injured
themselves, that would be assault and injury, which can be 15 years in prison and a half million yen
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fine. They were saying like, is it self -defense because the little kid got in the way? Which,
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okay, in the video, the kid did not get in the way. The woman went out of her way to check the kid
and knock them over. But, you know, the person is going to claim the kid was in the way with self -defense.
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Self -defense could only be claimed if it was unavoidable and clear. It was unavoidable and there was
nothing else you could do. Now, it should be a crossing. You can slow down. You can take a step to the side.
You can turn. There are a lot of things you can do to avoid this. Therefore, it was not self -defense
that would not hold up in court. If they find this woman, she would be guilty of assault without
injury because I’m assuming the kid just bounced because kids bounce. And therefore, if found guilty
and arrested, she could get two years in prison and a 300 ,000 yen fine. Don’t go knocking little
kids over. There is a sort of this weird thing that incel dudes in Japan do where they walk around
stations. They try to find people usually on their phone and they shoulder check them so they can say
that person wasn’t paying attention. And then the incel dudes will knock just generally into any
woman in their way and then claim they were in the way. And if they turn around and argue, what
they’re hoping is they’re too scared to actually like fight back. And this is how sort of they get
their jollies. In a good society, we don’t shoulder check anybody. One Piece is the best -selling
manga of all time with over 600 million copies sold. Now, they’ve got like a thousand manga, like comic
books out. So I don’t know how many of those are that or the compilation manga or anything, but it
doesn’t matter. It’s clearly the best -selling comic in all of history, which is really cool.
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What is the One Piece is the primary question. It’s what the pirates are all going after, like the
original One Piece. What is the One Piece? And this is like Lost. Like people claim that the writers of
Lost didn’t know what the actual conclusion was, what the island was. A bunch of people said,
it’s purgatory. And then the writers of Lost were like, no, it isn’t, but we know it is. And then
it turned out to be purgatory anyways, because they, I actually think they didn’t know what it
was when they started. They just hoped they were going to write their way out of it. Or they knew
it was purgatory. When people like figured it out, they were like, oh, but we can’t let them know that.
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The question is, does the author of One Piece know what the One Piece is? He’s saying, yes, it is.
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He wrote it down on a piece of paper and they released a video to celebrate the thousands,
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thousands. They were celebrating One Piece being the best -selling manga of all time.
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He writes down on a piece of paper what the One Piece is. Then he tears it in half and he puts
the half the paper into a special glass orb. And then there’s a scene of a boat going out to the
ocean and then dropping that glass orb overboard so that, you know, there is an actual treasure at the
bottom of the ocean that you could find that tells you what the One Piece is. That is technically in
this real world, the One Piece. This is actually really cool and creative and smart and I quite
like it. And it is where he dropped it. He says it’s going to be 651 meters down and people with way
too much money are already talking about how to figure out how to go dive down to it with, I guess,
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a submersible, get it, bring it back so they can claim they have solved the mystery of the One Piece
or found the One Piece or something like that. But I mean, as far as, you know, advertising stunts go,
this one didn’t seem to hurt anybody and it’s kind of interesting and cool and I’m glad he’s did it.
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There’s a cram school in Japan. Since we’re kind of talking animation and comics and things like that,
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all the teachers are VTubers. It’s called Luminaris Online Juku. So Juku is what kids do to study to get
ready for their exams. It’s a really stressful system in Japan. We’re hitting exam season right now. We’re
actually probably coming to the end of it. Kids are all stressed out. They’re doing exams.
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It’s a tough life. I do not actually think this is the best way to do it, but my opinion on this
matter is irrelevant. Kids find it hard to pay attention. So what’s something you could do to
get them to pay attention? Well, find something they like and they like VTubers. Will they listen
to VTubers when they talk about math? I don’t know, but if it’s going to help, I’m all for it.
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This is the kind of thing that seems stupid at first, but if it helps kids pay attention and listen,
I am down with it. Do whatever you can. I think education in manga form, education in comics,
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education in animation, whatever you can do to get kids to pay attention and learn is worthwhile.
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The courses you can take at Luminaris are math, physics, English, chemistry, world history,
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Japanese history, geography. It is $63, the equivalent, so about 7 ,000 yen a course a month.
So I think, I assume you would only do once a week or something, or maybe you would go more often,
but for each course, you can go for a month for 60, for 7 ,000 yen, and then you could probably take
multiples. You’d be paying, you know, multiples of that. I didn’t get a good sense of whether it was
only online, like pre -recorded things, but if they’re VTubers, I assume those are teachers.
They’re on the other side of the computer screen. You study, you ask them questions, you get response
in the VTuber voice and whatnot, and that, if it clicks for you, man, I mean anything to help kids out
and education in modern society. Yes, please.
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A man was pulled over. A man does a… So there were two stories. One was he rear -ended,
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one was a head -on crash, but it seems more stories said the head -on. So there was a head -on crash
with another car, and the cops show up like they’re supposed to. A man is standing outside his smashed
up car, drinking a chew high in front of the police. Now, the belief is that he was drinking the chew high,
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and he could say he started drinking the chew high after the crash, maybe because he was so stressed out
from the crash. And then the cops would be like, well, you were driving drunk. He’s like, no, no,
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you’re going to, of course, find alcohol in my system now because I was just drinking a chew high,
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but I wasn’t drinking a chew high when I was driving. I wasn’t drunk when I was driving.
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That was post -crash. The police, of course, say, hey, this seems really suspicious. We think maybe
you were drunk driving and not waiting until after the crash to drink the chew high. So the man takes the
rest the remainder of the chew high and pours it over the head of the police officer because that’s
a really sober thing to do. Then when he’s arrested, I mean, that’s also assault of a police officer.
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So you’re going to get in trouble for that. Even if you were sober while you crashed the car,
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crashing the car is probably already a problem. Claiming you were not drunk. I’m betting they have
a way to figure out if you were or not, but drinking at the scene of a crime, probably still
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somehow they could get you in trouble. Public intoxication or something like that.
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Pouring it on the police officer is assault of a police officer. Even again, like previously,
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no injury. It’s still assault. When he was arrested, he says, I didn’t pour it on him.
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It just happened. So like the police officer hit the man’s elbow. The chew high went up in the air
and poured on his head. I don’t know. I don’t believe any of it. I think the man was drunk and
his drunk mind, he was like, I have come up with a scheme to get out of the junk drunk driving charge.
Even if I have crashed my car into another car. A 44 year old man has been charged with causing the
death of a 32 year old woman by making her drink 32 shots of tequila. So I’m sure it was a challenge
or a bet or something like that. 32 shots is a lot, but it’s also very abstract. So I actually went and did
the math of what is two 32 shots of tequila. And so I asked the internet, which is of course, what the
best way to get all information, how many shots in a bottle of tequila. So 750 milliliters of tequila
will work out to 16 to 17 shots. She drank two bottles of tequila in 90 minutes. So I’m assuming it
was like almost like a chug challenge. Like you do it, stop, talk for 10 seconds, take a breath, do it
again, 90 minutes. Cause 32 shots in 90 minutes is one every couple of minutes. So it’s every five
minutes she’s downing a shot. And then she of course dies from alcohol poisoning. Uh, it’s true.
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I encouraged her to drink, but I didn’t have any sexual intent. So of course what the man is saying
that he did have sexual intent. Uh, he’s got her drunk and he was intending to take her to a hotel.
He was actually on the way to the hotel when she sort of collapsed. And then he realized he had done
something wrong. He’d gone too far. He calls the police. He calls an ambulance. Uh, they come up,
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they’re like, you got this woman drunk. You got her blackout drunk. You were taking to a hotel to
take advantage of her. He’s like, Oh yeah, I got her to drink, but I had no ill intent by taking her to
this hotel, which we’ve had this conversation. How many times there is only one reason to go to a love
hotel. And that is to try to do something untoward to another person, hopefully consensually, but in this
case, clearly not. I actually said I should end episodes on an upbeat note. And I, by pushing all
the heavy, heavy stories to the end, so they get heavier as they go along. I can’t do that. I can’t
talk my way out of this one. I hope he gets charged with murder, not manslaughter, not accidental murder
or something else, something lower. He intended to get her drunk. He intended to get her to drink as
much as humanly possible. He intended for this to happen for her to black out. And if someone’s
blackout drunk, you are one step away from killing them anyways. So I hope he gets charged with the
full charge you could get, which would be murder. Although I know the Japanese system is far too lenient
on this kind of stuff. And they’re going to say like, she did willfully drink it, even though he
encouraged her to, but man, people got to get charged for this stuff.
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So I hope you enjoyed it.