According to this news report, an unidentified 54-year-old man in Kobe, Japan, was arrested after he tried to use his fishing pole to snag a 21-year-old woman’s underwear, which was hanging out to dry on her second floor veranda. There are so many snarky things I can say about this story—I mean the “pole” metaphor alone can fill several posts, but I’ll refrain. Why? ‘Cause I feel sorry for the guy.
I know there’s a lot here that’s pathetic and funny. A guy walks by a house and sees some underwear hanging on the clothesline and steals it—OK, that I can sort of give a pass to. But this guy decided that he wanted the underwear so badly that he went home, grabbed his fishing pole and decided it was a good idea to try to hook some bras and panties like a trout. And it’s not like the perp was some 12-year-old kid, this was a grown 54-year-old man!
But here’s why I kind of feel bad for the dude. Obviously, women’s underwear fetishes aren’t unique to Japan, but the Japanese have probably embraced this lifestyle more completely than anyone else. Who else would have vending machines where you can buy new and used women’s underwear?
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata returned to earth today on the space shuttle Endeavour after spending 4 ½ months living in an orbiting space station. One of the experiments he conducted during his stay in space was to wear the same underwear for a whole month.
