Kobe drain pervert is back, caught filming up schoolgirl skirts

Just when you thought it was safe to walk by a drain in a skirt, the drain pervert is back!

If you live in Kobe, be sure to check the drains before walking over them.

Police in the West Japan city have arrested the 36-year-old Yasuomi Hirai for setting up a phone in a roadside drain in order to take videos of schoolgirls.

He was caught when the camera was filming an 18-year-old school student at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon on September 8. And he was found out because the girl was a Good Samaritan. She noticed the phone in the drain and took it to a police substation, believing it was a lost item.

The police realized it was set to record and started to investigate. Hirai was still in the clear, because the cops couldn’t get past the lock on the phone.

But then, on September 14, Hirai’s fetish got the better of him and officers found him on all fours inside a neighborhood drain.

“What are you doing?” they asked.

Hirai’s the kind of person who can’t help being honest. “I’m trying to peep up skirts,” he responded. He then aided the cops in their investigation of him by unlocking the seized phone and allowing them to see the saved videos he had shot.

This guy is a serial offender when it comes to drain peeping. He was previously arrested in 2013 and 2015, as reported here, and fined for his behavior. On those occasions, he went to even further extremes, actually lying in the drain himself for hours on end.

In 2015, his mother defended him, saying that Hirai’s actions are an extension of his childhood habit of hiding in small places.

The fetish for upskirting — get views or photos of panties from underneath, especially from underneath a skirt — is huge in Japan, where it is known as panchira. There are even photography exhibitions, special books, face masks, and bicycle saddles from practitioners.