Japanese man breaks into school to recover stuff teacher took from him…over 40 years ago

It should still be around somewhere, right?

Growing up, pretty much everyone has been in a classroom where a student gets caught with something they shouldn’t have brought to school, and then the teacher confiscates the item. That common scenario played out one day at a junior high school in the town of Mikasa, in Japan’s northern prefecture of Hokkaido, with a male student whose name hasn’t been released, whom we’ll call “Taro.”

It’s not clear what exactly was confiscated from Taro, but whatever it was, he wanted it back. So last week, while the school was closed for winter vacation, Taro, accompanied by his girlfriend, snuck into the school, with his eventual goal for the caper being to recover his contraband. The two managed to get inside one of the school’s staff rooms, but it wasn’t long until an employee who was on the premises heard them talking loudly and called the police to report the intruders. Oblivious to the approach of law enforcement, the couple was still in the school when officers arrived on the scene and arrested them for trespassing.

Getting the police involved, as opposed to calling the couple’s parents and telling them to come pick up their misbehaving children, might seem like overkill, as may arresting them instead of suspending them from school. The thing is, though, Taro is 63 years old, and his girlfriend is 58. Yes, both of them attended the middle school they broke into, but they also both graduated from it well over 40 years ago.

Life doesn’t seem to have taken the pair far from their childhood homes, as they both live in Iwamizawa, the city neighboring Mikasa to the east. The ire Taro felt from having whatever his teacher took taken from him also appears to still be something he holds close in his heart, considering the lengths he went to in his attempt to recover it. It’s unclear whether or not he expected the trading card, dirty magazine, Game Boy, or whatever the item was, to still be sitting in a storage closet after more than four decades, but he also said he was hoping to find his teacher’s contact information in the school’s files, perhaps in order to personally ask him to return it.

▼ Oh, wait, it couldn’t have been a Game Boy – those hadn’t been released yet when Taro was in middle school.

Still, considering his current age, it seems like the wiser thing for Taro to do would have been to simply call the school or walk in like a fully grown adult and politely ask for his stuff back. As for why he didn’t, both Taro and his girlfriend were intoxicated at the time of their arrest, so it seems like this may be a case of two people reminiscing about their student days while getting both liquored and worked up, then deciding “We should break into the school and get my stuff back!”, which is the sort of thing that really only ever sounds like a good idea to teenagers and drunk people.

Source: Hokkaido News UHB via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, STV
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