Thief steals 448 pairs of hostess high-heel shoes

Another day, another fetish-related crime.

We only just recently blogged about the man who stole everything from satchels to curtains from an elementary school, and now comes this news — first shared on Tokyo Reporter — of a thief whose interests was exclusively the shoes of hostesses.

Well, anything related to hostesses we can understand; these ladies inspire a thousand fetishes.

On Monday Tokyo Metropolitan Police announced that they had arrested a man for stealing shoes from hostesses.

Sho Sato (28) took high-heeled shoes from clubs in Tokyo, Kanagawa and Saitama.

The cops followed the trail to a rental unit that Sato used, finding an amazing 448 pairs of high heels!

Of course, hostesses’ shoes could be worth a lot, we hear you wondering… No, this was a pure-minded fetish, not motivated by money.

“I had no interest in selling the high-heeled shoes. Rather, it was a joy to steal,” Sato confessed to police.

Apparently in just one case Sato slipped into a club after midnight in November last year, taking 26 items — including over a dozen high-heel shoes and cosmetics — from a club dressing room in Ginza. This take was worth over half a million yen! Incredibly, the room was unlocked and used by hostesses in their twenties, thirties and forties from three Ginza clubs. He would target the changing rooms, though — he didn’t have the temerity to rip the shoes off the hostesses’ actual feet.

But Sato’s doom was sealed when he diverged from his fetish. He was caught stealing money from a club in Ikebukuro — that well-known pit of iniquity — and police took him in. From here they found out about his rental unit and then his Aladdin’s cave of shoes was uncovered.

The unemployed Sato himself wasn’t patronizing the clubs. He was so poor that he was living in internet cafes and had originally leased the rental unit in Suginami Ward in west Tokyo two years ago as a place to sleep.