It has been a bad week for convenience stores in Japan. Earlier this week, an elderly man drove his car through the front of a 7-11, killing a store clerk in the process. Now, a 39 year old man has been arrested for forcing staff of an Osaka convenience store to kneel down on the the ground while he extorted over $200 of tobacco from them.
The criminal made a fatal error when uploaded a video of his antics to YouTube. The video was removed almost immediately when it went viral after being posted on various internet portals, including 2ch.net, with the perpetrators faced floods of criticism from the nation’s netizens.
From Yahoo! Japan:
Video Of Convenience Store Clerks Being Forced To Bow Down On Knees Uploaded Online, 39 Year Old Unemployed Man Arrested
On September 9, the Ibaraki Division of Osaka Prefectural Police arrested Nakamura Tsuyoshi (39), unemployed, of Shuntokucho, Osaka City, on suspicion of making a false accusation against a store clerk and forcing him to hand over goods at a convenience store in Ibaraki City, Osaka. Police are investigation on the assumption that the man also had accomplices.
The scenes where the man and his accomplices threatened the store’s workers and made them kneel down on the ground had been uploaded to an online video sharing site, and there was a flood of online criticism in response to the suspect’s malicious behavior. The store made a damage report to the police.
The arrested suspect, Nakamura, was taking advantage of a situation on September 8, where an acquaintance of Nakamura had entered into a verbal disagreement with a male store worker at a convenience store in Ibaraki City, and threatened the shop’s management saying “This young friend of mine here is gonna drive his car through your store!” He then demanded “Usually, when you’re getting apologized to, you don’t leave with your hands empty, do ya?”, and extorted 6 cartons of cigarettes (retail value 26,700 yen [approx.$249]) from the store clerks.
Comments from Yahoo! Japan:
nan*****:
39…man, I thought he was about 20 or something.
Impossible to reform the guy.
liv*****:
He uploaded the video…Guess he probably felt ‘Dude I’ve done something so cool!’? But that’s not something a 39 year old would do, that’s something a high schooler would do. What’s more, never mind it going viral when he uploaded it, there were several things identified from the video and he ended up getting busted! Still, that was a speedy arrest !!!
＊＊＊＊＊:
He made them apologise, he even got some cigarettes, and I bet that at that time he was pretty pleased with himself, but that’s not how it works.
hgq*****:
He was 39….
What’s more they say he was doing it with a friend who was older than him.
How old was this friend, must be over 40, right?
Aren’t they embarrassed?
I guess they’re doing it because they think they’re cool, but they are so not cool.
mog*****:
They arrested him pretty quickly huh, that’s good. Well, is that really something you do at their age～?
com*****:
Good job to the cops.
They really dealt with this rapidly.
Please carry on doing your best!
kou*****:
Yeah there definitely must have been others there with him.
Hope they get arrested in quick succession.
nkm*****:
No matter which way you look at this, it’s still theft. Thank you so much.
ado*****:
I kinda feel like I saw something where the store clerks had agreed to kneel down…Was I mistaken?
u4m*****:
You’re a useless person if you do this kind of thing to people in a vulnerable situation.
When I think that this is the work of 39 year old, as someone who’s the same age it’s just too pathetic.
sor*****:
I guess that for the police it was pretty easy to deal with this case, the perpetrators had already put all the information out there.
I feel most sorry for the kid whose information got released because of what their parents did.
gha*****
I get that customers are precious, but
I honestly think that please like convenience stores and family restaurants [usually open 24 hours] (and so on and so on) go too easy on their customers. When they’re supplying goods and services, and then they get money for that, it’s an equal transaction.
Of course, I think that for a number of stores they’re like ‘thank you for choosing use’ and stuff, but if the customers are saying unreasonable things then they need to say clearly that the customer is wrong.
tsu*****:
Ummm…if you drive a car through the front of a store, you’re going to be the ones in trouble.
xxxxxx:
The store workers need to start turning people down firmly in this kind of situation.
And then if the customers don’t respond to that, they should call the police.
jyo*****:
Something like this happened before too, and even then the people who uploaded the video were arrested. Still, why are they doing the same thing again? There is nothing worse than an “adult” who doesn’t know what “they shouldn’t do”.
tat*****:
When I was a kid, I thought that everyone called an adult was an adult.
Even if I look at the people around me, in fact more so than children’s bullying, there is underhanded, irrational bullying going on, and there are old guys, still yankiis [delinquents] in their 40s and 50s, they’re not even former yankiis. It’s such a pity.
