Current Events > Man arrested for stealing hundreds of ladies raincoats from women for years.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Officers from the Osaka Prefectural Polices Abeno Precinct have placed Yoshio Yoda, a 51-year-old newspaper deliveryman, under arrest for a series of thefts of womens raincoats. Specifically, Yoda went after what are called kappa in Japanese, plastic or vinyl ponchos worn over ones clothing when going out on rainy days.

According to investigators, Yoda would follow women whom he saw riding bicycles, or look for bicycles in parking lots with attached additional child seats or frames with traditionally feminine colors, under the logic that their riders were more likely to be women. Hed then check to see if the owner had left a raincoat in the basket, and if they had, hed swipe it. As for why, well, in Yodas own words:

While this might at first seem to be connected to the dubious folk wisdom in Japan that the color of a womans umbrella matches the color of her underwear, Yoda explained that its the clinginess of the wet kappa that piques his peculiar interest.

His modus operandi of taking unattended rain coats out of bicycle baskets would seem to indicate that he was only able to steal them when the weather had cleared up after raining earlier in the day, or perhaps from covered lots attached to train stations, office buildings, or shopping centers. Even with those limiting factors, though, a search of Yodas home turned up roughly 360 raincoats, as Yoda says that he has been doing this since around 2009.

Theres a surprisingly large number of duplicate patterns, which could be the result of victims having bought their raincoats at the same stores in the Higashi Sumiyoshi ward where Yoda operated.



The police believe that around 320 of those were taken during a span from December 2013 to May of this year, during which stymied investigators took to calling the then-unidentified perpetrator Raincoat Man. As another shocking element of the case, based on an average estimated cost of 3,500 yen, investigators calculated the total damage from Yodas crimes during that period at 1.12 million yen.

Full Article:
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/Man-arrested-for-stealing-360-women%E2%80%99s-raincoats

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What a creep

Thank you for pointing out that the ladies raincoats were, in fact, stolen from women.