It's fair to say that the people of Kasuya, a sleepy town in western Japan, had never given much thought to Japan's homeless problem. But that all changed this week when one of its residents noticed that food had been mysteriously disappearing from his fridge.

Convinced that he was the victim of frequent burglaries, the 57-year-old resident installed security cameras that transmitted images from the inside of his house directly to his mobile phone. The culprit was not, as it turned out, a highly skilled and hungry burglar, but a middle-aged, homeless woman who had been living on the top shelf of his closet for several months.

Police arrested the 58-year-old, identified as Tatsuko Horikawa, on suspicion of trespassing after she was captured on film taking advantage of the owner's absence to move from her tiny dwelling to the fridge in search of food. Police had arrived expecting to apprehend a burglar but found the front door securely locked and the windows closed.

"We searched the house checking everywhere someone could possibly hide," a local police spokesman told the Associated Press, adding that the woman may have used the residence and other houses in the areas as makeshift sleeping quarters for the past year. "When we slid open the closet, there she was, nervously curled up on her side," he said.

Police said they had yet to determine how the woman entered the property, where the owner lived alone, or how she managed to live undetected for so long.

The owner, who has not been named, would not have been able to sniff out his uninvited guest: the woman took regular showers while he was out and, according to the spokesman, was unusually "neat and clean".