Robbers in Japan steal drunk man’s shoes and one million yen in cash

Parkside stop to rest turns out to be very costly.

On the night of September 23, a 38-year-old office worker in Osaka had been enjoying some drinks. Or maybe he hadn’t started knocking them back until after midnight on the 24th. Either way, in at some point in the pre-dawn hours his intoxicated fatigue became too much for him to handle, and he sat down to rest on the edge of a sidewalk-side planter at the edge of Nozaki Park in the city’s Kita Ward.

At around 3:50 a.m., he was approached by two men, who called out asking “Are you all right?”, to which the drunk man replied “I’m fine, so leave me alone.” However, it turned out that these two men weren’t actually offering help, and were instead looking to take his belongings.

▼ The section of the park where the encounter took place

While the man was still seated, the robbers suddenly shoved him, knocking him backwards so that his back was flat against the ground. They then grabbed his bag, which he says contained his wallet and roughly 1 million yen (US$6,300) in cash, and before running off, they removed and stole the victim’s shoes too.

▼ A CG reenactment of the incident

The man suffered a scraped elbow in the attack, but did not sustain any serious injuries. With his safety confirmed, many online commenters have been asking the same question: Why was he carrying so much cash?

“Shady.”
“Having a really hard time understanding who you’d go out and get drunk while you’ve got a million yen on you.”
“The robbers are the worst people in this story, but even still, there’s no good reason to put a million yen in your bag before going drinking.”
“If you’ve got that much cash on you, just go straight home without drinking all night.”
“Having a million yen in cash makes you think it’s got to be money that you can’t be open and upfront about.”
“The criminals probably somehow knew he had that money on him.”
“Did the robbers know he was on his way to meet up with someone and followed him?”
“Japanese safety is becoming a myth.”
“We’re living in a time when it’s not safe to stumble home drunk anymore.”
“Maybe it was some kind of insurance scam?”
“Do the robbers have some kind of a footwear fetish?”

Addressing the last comment first, the obvious reason for the robbers taking the man’s shoes is that it’d make it harder for him to chase after them. As for the startling amount of money he had on him, that’s actually kind of complicated.

While incidents have been on the rise recently, Japan still has very little street crime, and cash payments are prevalent, including for things, and at locations, that would be very unusual in many other countries. Several kinds of tax and utility payments, for example, can be made in cash at convenience stores 24 hours a day, and many online retailers also allow customers to place their orders through their website, then render payment, in cash if they wish, at convenience stores. If someone were planning to make several such payments in one fell swoop, they might have quite a few bills on them.

The area around the park is also rather urban. It’s located only about a five-minute walk from Umeda Station, one of Osaka’s main rail hubs, with a number of office and condominium high rises nearby. The victim himself lives in the neighborhood, and, ostensibly, there could have been some legitimate business or living expense-related purposes that the cash was earmarked for.

▼ Another video showing the park and surrounding neighborhood

Even with all that taken into account, though, a million yen is still far beyond what most Japanese people would consider a common-sense amount be carrying, by a wide enough margin that doing anything other than taking it directly home or to render payment is reckless. Carrying around that much cash while drunk is a baffling, understandably suspicion-arousing amount of risk to accept.

That said, the victim himself is the one who contacted the police and reported the incident, which doesn’t seem like something he’d do if the stolen money was also dirty money, and at this time the police are proceeding with the investigation with the robbery itself as the only crime that’s taken place.

Source: FNN Prime Online, Sankei Shimbun, YouTube/読売テレビニュース, YouTube/日テレNEWS
Top image: Pakutaso
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