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Man in Japan arrested after sneaking into woman’s apartment and washing her lingerie

Casey Baseel Nov 3, 2023
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Remembering to hang it up to dry afterwards not likely to earn him any clemency.

On the morning of October 30, a 28-year-old woman living in the town of Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture went out from her apartment for the day. Unfortunately, she left her door unlocked, and sure enough, while she had been out, an intruder had let himself in.

As is not infrequently the case in such incidents in Japan, the man who had entered the woman’s apartment was targeting her underwear. However, the intruder was no panty thief, as he didn’t take any of the undergarments with him when he left. As a matter of fact, the woman might not have even known anyone had been in her apartment while she was gone, except for the fact that when she returned in the evening she noticed that her underwear had been washed and hung up to dry, along with some other articles of her clothing.

Now, there are many cases where someone doing your laundry for you is a convenient, and/or considerate thing, for instance if it’s your spouse or a maid service you’ve hired. This, though, was obviously not one of those desirable situations, and so the next day the woman went to her local police box and reported the incident to the officers on duty.

It wasn’t long before the culprit was in custody. Before the day was done, another resident of the apartment building the woman lives in came to the police box, bringing along a third resident of the building, a 50-year-old man, who admitted that “There is no mistake that I entered [the woman’s] apartment without permission” and that he had washed the lingerie and other clothing.

The bizarre crime has left Japanese Twitter commenters baffled, with reactions including:

“The hell was he thinking?”
“It’s like one of those fairytales where gnomes do things around your house when you’re not home.”
“This sort of crime is on a plane beyond what my brain can understand.”
“If the circumstances had been different, he’d be a gentleman, but he’s a perv.”
“So he’s an underwear fetishist who’s also into cleanliness?”
“Washing underwear instead of stealing it? That’s some high-level perversion of its own.”
“It’s a very specific propensity.”

The man has been placed under arrest for trespassing. With the door having been left unlocked, it’s unclear if breaking and entering charges could be levied, as is what specific crime, if any, unauthorized laundry activities fall under, but at the very least it would seem like the apartment landlord has grounds to evict the man from the building.

As of this writing, the police are still investigating the incident and trying to determine a motive, but it’s a pretty safe bet that they’re not going to find one that makes sense.

Source: SBS via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, Twitter
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