54-year-old Japanese woman stops armed robbery at her convenience store with her brute strength

When her much-younger, knife-wielding assailant asked her for the money, she decided that the time for talk was done, and the time for action was now.

Armed robbery isn’t as easy as it looks. We recently examined the tale of an 83-year-old man who was arrested in Osaka when he was outwitted by his would-be victims, and now comes an incident in which a criminal’s ambitions were foiled not because of age-diminished mental facilities, but because of what appears to be a severe lack of physical strength for a man of his age.

On the afternoon of August 29, at roughly 3:50, a man walked into the Kikuma branch of convenience store chain 7-Eleven in Ichihara, Chiba Prefecture. The man was described as appearing to be about 20 years old, 165 centimeters (65 inches) tall, and of slender build, and was dressed in a black shirt and black pants.

At the time there were two part-time employees working in the front of the store, a 20-year-old man and a 54-year-old woman. The man in black walked up to the woman and pulled out a knife with a 20-centimeter (7.9-inch) blade. “Put the money in here!” he demanded while holding out an empty bag, making sure to use a clearly-phrased command so as to avoid any accidental or willful misinterpretation of his words.

As the woman stood there, looking at this man who was some 30-plus years her junior, perhaps it occurred to her that, by their ages, he was young enough to be her son. And while that didn’t melt her heart and make her take pity on the robber, she did respond in a way reminiscent of a mother who’s had enough of her kid’s crap.

Instead of giving the robber a single yen, she grabbed him by the arm. Then, with her male coworker watching, she forcibly dragged the robber out of the store. The man in black then fled on foot, with nothing taken from the shop and no one injured.

Online commenters had the following to say:

“The store manager should pay the woman extra since she ended up doing security guard duty too.”

“They should totally write a book about her.”

“Dude, help out, male clerk!”

“Just how weak is that robber?”

“Wait, are we sure she wasn’t really his mom after all?”

While the female clerk and the man in black are indeed unrelated, we imagine her kids, if she has any, are very well-behaved.

Source: Sankei News
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