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Think you had a rough commute? Japanese salaryman gets jumped by wild boar on way to work【Vid】

Casey Baseel Nov 7, 2018
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After knocking him down, the animal came back to try to finish the job.

Tokyo’s ridiculously crowded rush hour trains aren’t just shocking to foreign visitors, but even to people who were born and raised in Japan. Seeing people packed into the carriages so tightly that sometimes even one passenger pusher isn’t enough to get everyone boarded, it’s no surprise that some working professionals choose to earn their living elsewhere, in communities with less stressful commutes.

For example, in the video below, shared by Japanese Twitter user @Koki915N, we can see a 48-year-old salaryman strolling up to Imajuku Station, in the suburbs west of downtown Fukuoka, at a little after 7 in the morning on October 26. He looks calm and relaxed, perhaps going over the details of whatever business meetings he had planned for the day, until the moment when his mental focus was no doubt shifted to the fact that he was suddenly being attacked by a wild boar.

https://twitter.com/Koki915N/status/1058963346915913728

Imajuku Station is about one kilometer (0.6 miles) away from some nearby mountains, and it’s believed the animal wandered into town from the foothills. After running into a dead-end in a gap between a pharmacy and its surrounding chain-link fence, the boar turns around and dashes back out the way it came in, just at the moment when the salaryman, with perhaps the worst luck of any commuter in Japan that morning, is walking by.

The solidly built creature, measuring about one meter (3.3 feet) in length, barrels right into the man’s left knee, sending him flying through the air with his body parallel to the ground before crashing back down to the asphalt. While the initial collision looks to have been an accident, the boar is now some combination of frightened and enraged, and it turns back towards the man, who’s still on the ground, charging in again to stab at him with its tusks and bite him on the left thigh.

Luckily, two cars happen to have pulled up to the scene, and they both start blasting their horns, successfully startling the boar enough that it breaks off its attack, giving the salaryman a chance to escape. There’s a tense moment where it looks like the boar is about to charge the green hatchback, but it instead dashes past it before disappearing into another alley on the far side of the street.

The man was taken to the station’s medical care room where he received first aid before later being taken to a local hospital where he was treated for wounds on both legs, including a seven-centimeter (2.8-inch) gash on his left thigh where the boar bit him, requiring a total of 13 stitches.

“It seemed to me like it hurt,” said a station worker who attended to the salaryman, in an amazing display of his skill at understatement.

As for the boar, it was spotted later that afternoon at a coastal area about one kilometer from Imajuku Station, where it was exterminated by members of a local hunting club (the local municipality apparently being on better terms with its hunters than in bear-patrol-payment-feuding Shimamaki).

The incident serves as an important reminder that while wild boars may be adorable as they’re out for a family jog in natural environments…

https://twitter.com/kubokubo_125/status/1059444348230631429

…they’re definitely not the sort of animals you want to approach and try to pet if you happen to run into them on the city streets, or inside a restaurant, for that matter.

Source: Twitter/@Koki915N via Jin, YouTube/TNC みんなのニュース福
Top image: Wikipedia/そらみみ

Follow Casey on Twitter, provided you’re not being attacked by a boar at this very moment.