Real life doesn’t work like anime – Tokyo man arrested after letting schoolgirl live with him

You’d expect most people to realize this was a bad idea, but this guy especially.

Among the anime that premiered this spring was Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway. The lengthy title covers most of the premise, as it’s a story about a single young adult salaryman who lets a runaway schoolgirl live with him while she figures out what the next stage of her life is going to be.

It’s not the most preposterous setup ever for an anime series, but it’s definitely a case where the situation would quickly lose just about any pretense of wholesomeness in real life. As proof, 29-year-old Takeharu Komiya has been arrested following four days of cohabiting with a high school girl who ran away from home.

The two became acquainted through social media, where the girl had posted about wanting to leave home, eventually telling Komiya “I’d be happy if you’d give me the option of running away to your place.” He agreed, and on June 13 the girl made her way from her home in Saitama Prefecture, which borders Tokyo to the north, to Komiya’s condominium in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward.

The girl’s parents, who were unaware of what their daughter had done, contacted the police when she didn’t come home that night. The ensuing search led them to Komiya’s condo, where he and the girl were both present. Komiya has admitted to the course of events outlined above and was placed under arrest on suspicion of abducting a minor. The girl showed no sign of injuries.

There’s perhaps a claim to be made that since the girl was apparently the one who initially floated the idea of living at Komiya’s condo, and came of her own free will once he agreed, that “abducting” isn’t the right word for what he did. That’s a semantics argument, though, and in the eyes of the law, saying “Sure!” when a minor asks if they can live with you without their parents’ consent, that’s still generally considered kidnapping. Granted, that’s something laymen might not realize on their own, but with Komiya being a lawyer by profession, you’d expect him to have been conscious of the legal ramifications of what he was doing.

Sources: NHK News Web, TBS via Yahoo! Japan News
Top image: Pakutaso
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