Final conclusion of story here:

”Nasty way to release stress”

When the police opened the door of the car, a foul stench hit them. Inside
the car were PET bottles filled with feces and urine. This was all police
needed to close a particularly nasty case in Osaka.

Since July there had been 15 cases of a motorist throwing feces and urine at
young female pedestrians.

On Sept 16, police at Higashi-Sumiyoshi station in Osaka arrested Kazumasa
Kurimoto, 39, an assistant manager in the electronic components section for
Sharp, on charges of assault and destruction of property.

“Kurimoto had been making and storing the PET bottles and their contents in
his garage,” said a police spokesman. “In his car, we found 2-liter bottles
cut in half. He wrapped the open top so that nothing would spill out. When
he was ready to go out, he poured feces and urine into a half-liter or 350ml
bottles with the top cut off.”

According to the police, Kurimoto has confessed to five cases out of the 15.

“I was really stressed out, and I just did it for fun. It was fun to watch
the young woman being disgusted,” police quoted him as saying.

A spokesperson for Sharp expressed disbelief at the news of Kurimoto’s
arrest. “He has never been late to work or skipped a day. His work ethic was
very good.”

A colleague said: “He was learning English for his job and really worked
hard.”

How could a man who seemed to be earnest at work in his managerial position
commit such abnormal acts? Shukan Post dug into his life deeper and found
that Kurimoto changed after getting divorced and then remarrying.

“Kurimoto got divorced in February last year. His eldest son stayed with him
and the younger son left with the mother,” said a neighbor. “In March of
this year, he married a Chinese woman in her 20s. It was around then that he
started to agonize over something.

“He had made a down payment on a house, which his ex-wife purchased. I also
heard that he had been sending money for child support each month aside from
the down payment,” said the neighbor.

“At the same time, he had to pay off a loan on his own house and send money
to his parents-in-law in China each month. His parents, who lived with him
under the same roof, were grumbling that Kurimoto was using their pensions
to meet his financial obligations.”

Meanwhile, there was a feud between his parents and his Chinese wife.

“From what I understand, they’d quarrel about everything from dinner to
their customs,” said an acquaintance of Kurimoto. “And poor Kurimoto was
caught in between the two sides and the fights never ended.”

Possibly due to the continuous trouble, Kurimoto no longer played with his
son. Neighbors said the two used to play catch quite often in the past, but
recently they saw the boy playing outside by himself a lot.

“His work also got very hectic and he used to go home late at night,” said a
colleague at Sharp. “He wasn’t a guy who liked drinking either, so maybe
there wasn’t an outlet for him to release his stress. I guess he just
flipped.” (Translated by Toshiya Fujii)

September 30, 2005

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=shukan&id=300

I think you make an excellent point, Joel. My first job out of university was as a housing inspector in an East Coast city. 70% of the people lived in rental units, and in those days landlords just considered the apartments as investments that didn’t require any expenditure.

The city aggressively moved to abate many different potential threats to health and life.

I came to Japan some years later and saw some guy on a busy street operating what was essentially a junkyard on a small lot that he never cleaned. In addition to his “merchandise”, there were mounds of trash. Anyone throwing a lit cigarette butt in there might have wound up torching the whole neighborhood.

Not long after that, I wound up teaching an English class to new firefighter trainees (as a response to the increase in foreign residents).

I asked the head of the firefighting school about that specific site and why the fire department didn’t do anything about it.

He said they would like to make the guy clean it up, but that he couldn’t. Get this–he said that legally, it would be considered an infringement of privacy.

I said that in the US, if the authorities deemed the menace serious enough, a court could issue an order allowing the city to clean it up themselves and send the bill to the owner.

There are no such legal provisions in Japan.

At least he didn’t say “elderly”