This one must be a form of mental sickness...

A Japanese company employee Hirai Yasuomi (28) has been arrested again for violating the Prefectural Anti-Nuisance Bylaw after he tried to catch a glimpse of women’s underwear as he lay in a gutter.

According to police, he is thought to have spend 5 hours lurking in the narrow gutter. Hirai admits to the charges, saying “I did it because I wanted to look up women’s skirts”. Hirai was also arrested on the same charge two years ago, and police are proceeding with their investigations on the assumption that Hirai was peeping with the aim of secretly taking photographs of the women’s underwear on his smartphone.



His somewhat tenacious peeping was discovered in the middle of summer this year, when on August 16 at 7:50 a.m., hIRAI was caught after he filmed up the skirt of a 37-year-old beauty artist as she strolled past a storm drain grating under which he was sprawled on his back.

According to police, at around 3am Hirai entered the small gutter, which is 60cm deep, 55cm wide, has a length of 35cm, in Higashinada Okamoto 1-chome. Hirai fitted his body into the gutter’s 40cm wide earthenware pipe and lay facing upwards so that only his head and wrists were above the pipe. He put the iron grill back over the top of the gutter, and lay in wait for women to walk by. He had his smartphone with him, and it is assumed he intended to photograph the women secretly.

At around 7:50am, a beautician noticed that there was hair protruding from the gutter’s iron grill. When she approached thinking it was a wig, it moved. It was human hair. When she looked closer, she saw what looked like a man’s face, and Hirai stared heR right in the eye. The woman screamed loudly and ran away, calling 110 to report the situation to police.

When officers immediately rushed to the scene, the man was still lying in the pipe. He had long unkempt hair and was wearing a t-shirt. Hirai was pulled out from the gutter, and told police “Make no mistake about it. I wanted to peep up their skirts”. He did not resist police.

When police investigated the videos stored on Hirai’s smartphone, they found several still images and videos that Hirai appeared to have secretly take on women’s underwear.

In June 2013 Hirai had also been arrested on the same charges for having peeped at women’s underwear while lying in a gutter at a different location in Higashinada. At the time, he had told police: “When I’m reborn, I want to be a street”