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What happens when you leave a pair of jeans hanging in the Japanese mountains for seven months?

Casey Baseel Jan 16, 2025
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This idea stinks.

As regular readers of our site know, when he’s got the time, there’s nothing that SoraNews24 boss and founder Yoshio enjoys more than dashing off to the SoraHouse, our crazy cheap country home nestled in the mountains of Saitama Prefecture. It’s a great place to get away from the urban hustle and bustle of downtown Tokyo, and Yoshio always feels refreshed after spending the day breathing the crisp, clean air, feeling the gentle caress of the wind, and soaking up the sunlight while being serenaded by the sounds of the surrounding forestland.

So he got to thinking, if spending a day in the Japanese mountains was good for him, just imagine how great it would be for a pair of jeans to spend half a year in the Japanese mountains!

And so it was that on a sunny afternoon last spring Yoshio headed to the SoraHouse with a pair of button-fly Levi’s.

Actually, Yoshio can’t claim full credit for this idea, as he has vague memories of Japanese celebrity and denim fan George Tokoro saying he’d aged a pair of jeans by hanging them outside his home. And hey, if the idea worked in, ostensibly, a posh showbiz star’s garden which is regularly maintained and which the owner frequently checks up on, it should be applicable to a semi-restored home that’s essentially an empty shack in the woods left unattended for weeks at a time between our visits, right?

It was with this unquestionable logic (in the sense that he didn’t tell anyone about it at the time, so we were literally unable to question it) that on May 15 Yoshio hung the jeans on a hanger and hung that hanger up on a lamp fixture outside the SoraHouse.

Then he went away for a month.

On his next visit, June 20, the jeans looked like they do in the photos directly above and below. The color had started to fade, giving them a rugged, lived-in look far beyond what they’d have had after a month of regular use.

Another month passed before Yoshio’s next chance to check on the jeans, July 21.

When the fall came around, the jeans had taken on a rockstar-ish distressed look, as shown here on October 10.

And finally, on December 23, they looked like this.

▼ The visual results of seven months of hanging in the Japanese mountains.

But why did Yoshio decide to wrap things up on December 23? Because this wasn’t just an experiment, it was also part of his Christmas preparations. Rather than keep these one-of-a-kind jeans for himself, Yoshio had been planning all along to give them to one of our writers, Masanuki Sunakoma, as a Christmas present, so he made like Santa and stuffed the jeans in a sack and brought them back to Tokyo.

Christmas Day isn’t actually a holiday in Japan, so on December 25, the SoraNews24 staff showed up at the office as usual. Yoshio, having been looking forward to this moment for months, waited until Masanuki had clocked in, then smugly opened up his sack…

…and showed Masanuki his present!

But as Yoshio held out the jeans for Masanuki to try on, the recipient of this unusual present noticed something else he hadn’t been expecting.

We’ve blurred the image for the sake of our more sensitive readers, but as Yoshio extended his arm…

…a stinkbug crawled energetically out of the jeans’ back pocket.

At first there was some awkward laughter, but this quickly turned to panicked screams as we discovered that over the course of seven months hanging in the mountains, many, many stinkbugs had taken up residence in the jeans, and Yoshio hadn’t thought to check the pockets before bringing the pants, and by extension the entire stinkbug colony, to the office!

Looking into the science of the situation later, apparently stinkbugs like to hang out in warm, secure spots, and the pockets of a pair of jeans hanging in a spot with good sunlight is very attractive to them.

As our unintended new officemates scurried around SoraNews24 HQ, those members of our human staff who’d recovered from the shock started taking countermeasures, such as laying down sticky tape traps.

Since no one else was willing to touch the jeans, it fell to Yoshio to pick them back up off the floor. He could see that the pockets were still filled with stinkbugs, though, so he went out on the balcony and started slapping them furiously against the railing.

▼ Ah, the wonder and whmisey of Christmas morning!

By the way, we should take this moment to apologize for any discomfort we may have caused our neighbors by raining stinkbugs down from our balcony. If it’s any consolation, we were, in a sense, punished for this behavior. Once Yoshio stopped whacking the denim, he checked to see the results of his panicked response.

Yes, all that shaking and pounding meant that there were no longer any stinkbugs inside the pants. However, what was now in the pockets were a ton of smashed stinkbug carcasses, plus the foul-smelling excretions they’d released before death while they were freaking out.

But hey, at least the jeans were now completely free of live stinkbugs, right? So that meant Yoshio could finally give Masanuki his Christmas present!

And honestly, if you ignored the jeans’ smell (which was, in a sense, easy to do, since at this point the entire office smelled like stinkbug stank), the pants themselves do look sort of cool!

But once again, it turned out Yoshio hadn’t thought certain aspects of this plan through, because he’d apparently forgotten to take into account that…

…Masanuki is pretty much the tallest guy in the office, and the mountain-aged jeans don’t fit him at all.

But it’s bad form to refuse a present, and especially so when it’s one someone spent months and months preparing. So Masanuki accepted the jeans from Yoshio, then as soon as our boss wasn’t looking, set about trying to regift them.

▼ “Hey, P.K., you want these?”

▼ “How about you, Harada?”

So in the end, we’ve got a new top-ranker in the list of “worst presents ever from our boss,” even worse than that time he gave out 100,000 one-yen coins.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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