Cops throw the book at dumpers of dirty DVDs

A 47-year-old public servant in Mie Prefecture has found himself in big trouble, reports Nikkan Gendai (May 27). It seems he’d decided it was time to get rid of his bulky collection of 284 pornographic mags and 53 adult videos, weighing about 150 kilograms in total.

“Around 10:30 p.m. on the night of March 18, he drove to Uda City (in neighboring Nara Prefecture) and discarded the items by flinging them over a guard rail into a rice paddy,” a police source tells the newspaper. “Since some of the videos still carried labels with the name of the shop where they were purchased — which rents in addition to sells — we were able to pore through their customer records and trace him.”

The man, an employee of Nabari City in Mie, was summoned to the police station and placed under arrest on May 25 for the illegal dumping of waste.

Apparently such crimes are not unusual. Last February a 33-year-old man in Aichi Prefecture was sent to the prosecutor on charges of discarding some 1,000 pornographic movies.

“I told my wife to get rid of them,” he explained to the authorities, to no avail. “I was ashamed and didn’t want anyone to know I’d been watching.”

In August 2008, a 60-year-old widower in Shizuoka Prefecture was arrested for abandoning the “corpse” of his life-size sex doll, which he discarded on a nearby mountain slope before going to live with his son and daughter-in-law.

The man reportedly told the local police he’d felt sorry for the doll and couldn’t bring himself to chop her up into small pieces.

“In the 23 wards of central Tokyo, porno magazines are treated like any other recyclable waste,” says a source in the recycling industry. “You just put them out for collection on the appointed day. If you don’t want your neighbors to know you’ve been reading them, then carry them down the street to another pick-up point. Or, stick them in a bag so the contents aren’t visible. Video cassettes and DVDs are processed as regular combustible waste.

“But if you’ve got a sex doll, please dismember her first before taking her out to the curb,” the source requests.

That’s the trouble with fun, frowns Nikkan Gendai — you’ve usually got to clean up afterwards.

Source: “Do surya ii no? Fuyo ni natta erohon ya AV no shimatsu,” Nikkan Gendai (May 27, page 7)