One Man’s Food is Another Girl’s Gym Shoes?

We have all been warned by our mothers about those suspicious characters in raincoats lurking on dark corners who tempt children with tales of candy and lost puppies.
Few of us, however, even knew about those other kinds of perverts, the run-of-the mill, next-door variety whose bizarre behavior is hidden behind locked doors at least for most of the time?


Consider the recent report about a 49-year-old Japanese man who was arrested for selling hentai don (a dish made with egg-rice). On the surface this may seems like an infraction of civil rights, but the arrest was based on the discovery that the dish contained a special secret ingredient: stolen girls’ gym shoes and clothes.

It is said that the police tracked down the bizarre gourmand from an Internet epicurean website which had given the dish a legitimate ranking last summer.
“I looked at the rankings of perverts on a website and wanted to do something to raise people’s eyebrows. I thought it would be good to be caught doing something…On top I add finely diced used school swimwear and gym shorts…” said the accused, reinforcing suspicions that he had truly fallen over some invisible edge.
Once confessing, he couldn’t stop and went on to admit that he had also stolen the eggs he used in the recipe from a hen-breeding program in the same school.
It must be said that this story was printed and distributed in a Japanese newspaper, which would be the equivalent of the satirical Onion, and despite being picked up by many other news sources, has since been discovered to be a bogus report.
It is odd that this story circulated so widely and one can only wonder about the truth behind…well, many other things.