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60-year-old Japanese laundromat owner fights panty thief half his age, almost gets run over【Vid】

Casey Baseel Mar 11, 2023
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Thief tells owner what he’s doing in “none of your concern,” but brave senior disagrees.

At around 12:20 in the morning last Sunday, a 27-year-old man walked into a laundromat in the Kasaharacho neighborhood of Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture. He wasn’t carrying any clothes to wash, or even a bag, but that’s not all that unusual. If people in Japan are drying their clothes at a laundromat, they’ll often go run errands or hit up the local convenience store while the cycle is going on, leaving their laundry bag hanging on the dryer’s handle.

However, after the man entered, he went and stood in front of a stopped dryer with no bag on the handle. After checking over his shoulder, he opened the dryer’s door and began ruffling through the women’s underwear inside.

The man had failed, though, to notice the presence of the laundromat’s owner, Takuya Yamano. The 60-year-old Yamano walked up to the younger man and asked “What’re you doing?”, to which he replied “None of your concern. None of your concern” and “I’m not stealing anything.”

Of course, suspicious behavior at his place of business is of the utmost concern to Yamano, and the man himself so quickly bringing up the subject of stealing underwear didn’t make him seem any less shady. Yamano said he was going to call the police, which led to a verbal altercation which turned physical in the laundromat’s parking lot, where things got especially crazy.

As seen in the video above, Yamano grabs the man by the arm, attempting to prevent him from leaving the scene before the police arrive. The man then grabs Yamano, before telling him “I’ll give you money, so let me off,” “Come on, don’t call the police,” and “Let me keep this out of court.”

Yamano refuses, and the two continue to scuffle. About four minutes after the confrontation started, the younger man separates himself from Yamano and hops in his car. Yamano then stands in front of the parking lot’s exit, to stop him from driving off. The strategy works for a few moments, until the younger man decides to hit the gas anyone, resulting in Yamano clinging to the hood of the SUV as he starts driving down the street.

“I just wanted to stop him,” Yamano recalls. “’He’s really going to drive off like this,’ I thought. It was startling. I thought things like this only happened in TV shows, but they happen in real life too.”

▼ The laundromat and parking lot where the incident took place

After driving a short distance, the man stopped the car and threw it into reverse, backing down the road quickly enough that Yamano slid off the hood and accelerating away. Luckily, his actions were caught on no less than three security cameras. By examining the videos, the police were able to identify the car and from that track down its owner, one Takui Tomita, who has been arrested and admitted that he is the man seen in the footage.

Yamano is being praised for his fast reaction and courage, and judging from his cheerful disposition in post-incident interview featured in the above video, doesn’t appear to have suffered any serious injuries.

Sources: FNN Prime Online, Ibaraki Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun
Photo ©SoraNews24
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Follow Casey on Twitter, where he used his neighborhood laundromat for almost ten years, but was never in danger of getting run over.