The Great Train Robbery (Japanese Style)

Occasionally I stumble across a factoid or news article so delicious that I feel compelled to tuck it away for further contemplation. The basic idea is that I might blog about it later - generally I don't, but I might. One such incident that I tucked away was a series of news articles on the great train robbery (or actually robberies) that took place in Japan late in 2015 and early in 2016.


Reports of the robberies began to filter through in the Japanese press late in December 2015 and by late January 2016, they hard started to hit the English press in Japan. In early February, the BBC reported on the robberies and Japan was once again front and centre in world news.

The robberies were the theft of hand-straps. You know, the dangly things that you grab onto when you have to stand on the train. Well someone was stealing them and in Japan it was a matter of high alert. Newspaper reports breathlessly told of the danger to passengers when the strap was missing and went on to speculate on the likely culprit(s) behind the thefts.

Otaku were high on the list of suspects.

Otaku is a Japanese word that is usually translated into English as 'nerd', but that doesn't really do them justice. Otaku are obsessed with a subject, it might be noodles or bath tiles or 16th century clocks, but they have a subject and they are obsessed with it. The newspapers speculated that a train-otaku or perhaps a roving gang of train otaku were responsible for the thefts.

Of course Japan has taken the whole concept of nerd/otaku to heights undreamed of in western lands and claiming to be a train nerd simply betrays that you are not serious. Japan can't abide the idea of train nerd. It's too plain, too simple. There are train history nerds, train station nerds, train timetable nerds and even train rail nerds. Train rail nerds (Senrou-tetsu) are people who are fascinated by the steel rails on which trains run.

There are even train sound nerds. They can identify the make and model of a train by the sound alone.

In this case, the suspicion fell upon shuushuu-tetsu, these are a specific type of train nerd that likes to collect train related paraphernalia.

The newspapers also took the opportunity to reproduce the famed poem of Shigemi Iketani (池谷しげみ). Iketani penned a "tanka", a short poem with a syllabic beat of 5-7-5-7-7, slightly longer than a haiku. This particular tanka goes:

The hand that fails to grab a hand strap and swims in the air,
Is the hand that grips anxiety for the day.

I think there's something in that for all of us.

There were also feature articles about the hand-strap and how they had always been round until Japan developed the triangle shaped handle in 1970. It appears that it wasn't a person, it was 'Japan'.

I failed to follow up on the robberies - I can't for the life of me believe I was so lax - and it was only today that I notice an old 'draft' that I had saved containing a few links and nothing more. Naturally, I scurried around the internet investigating the outcome.

Much to my surprise, the culprit was not an otaku, but an ordinary salaryman. His name annoyingly is Michio Matsumuru. I say annoyingly because it is damnably close to the name Michio Matsumura, who happens to be a golfer of some renown and thereby hogs all the google hits.

Matsumuru, the hand-strap thief, not the golfer, turns out to be an ordinary 63 year old who was pissed off that the trains were so crowded. He felt that he could wreak revenge on the train companies by nicking their hand-straps. That's all. Rather an anti-climax.

So the case of the great train robber was solved and Japan managed to soldier on.


Photo courtesy LERK [CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5), CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons