Serial footwear thief at Hokkaido school smells shoes before selecting his choice
We all have our peccadilloes, but some are stranger than others.
Some of them are rightfully referred to as fetishes — and some will get you arrested. And sometimes they are both.
Judging by the astounding amount of smell fetish toys, sprays, and lubes available, Japan would seem to have a thing for erotic aromas.
A minority, though, inevitably take things too far.
One day, a Japanese man decided he wanted to take some shoes from a school in Noboribetsu on the northern island of Hokkaido. But he didn’t want them as ordinary footwear. No, his interest lay in their pungent value and, to check, he gave different ones an expert sniff before he selected his choice of shoes to steal. This time it was a pair of female footwear.
It was not the first time that the elementary school has experienced such a theft and the prior crimes are the reason it installed the surveillance camera in the entrance to its gymnasium. This meant footage was captured of Hajime Okazaki crawling on all fours and carefully picking up the shoes to test their respective smells according to certain olfactory criteria to which only he is privy. It’s like something out of Edogawa Rampo.
With surveillance footage showing him in the act, it was perhaps only a matter of time before Okazaki was apprehended by the boys in blue. A police search of 41-year-old Okazaki’s residency in Tomakomai City turned up around 20 pairs of shoes that would seem to be stolen from other people. Okazaki claimed his crime spree was driven solely by smell and it didn’t matter if it was male or female shoes.
