Not that we’ve ever actually done anything even remotely resembling it, but we imagine landscaping is some pretty hard work. Imagine, though, how much more difficult it could be if you’re trying to prune your trees while dozens of police officers and a search helicopter descend on your location like you’re in the world’s worst garden-tending-themed reality show.

Recently, one Shiga Prefecture man found out just how bad the seemingly mundane task of cutting a few branches could get when a mother, picking up her child from a nearby preschool, spotted the saw-wielding, 80-year-old man hanging out in some trees and promptly called the police.

Apparently Shiga Prefecture is an extraordinarily safe place to live, because not one, not two, but 70 police officers, who were apparently having a pretty slow day, and even a search helicopter, swiftly responded to the woman’s distress call.

“We’ve been waiting years to actually use this thing!”

Now this might have ended badly if the poor old guy, who was allegedly taking it upon himself to prune some cherry trees in the area to prevent caterpillars from nesting on them, had panicked or if the police could even find the guy in the first place.

According to news reports, the hapless landscaper just kept going on with his work while the police milled about beneath him, probably looking around for a guy that looked more like this, without even realizing that the potential knife-wielding maniac might have been the elderly guy in coveralls just above their heads.

Now, we don’t know anything about the old guy, but we have to conclude he’s a pretty decent dude on the inside, because instead of capitalizing on the police’s unwariness, screaming “DEATH FROM ABOVE!!!” and jumping down to slice them up with his rusty handsaw, he actually called down to the gathered police to ask what all the fuss was about.

It turns out neither the old man nor the police suspected he was the cause of all the trouble, probably because guys pruning trees is a pretty common sight in Japan and, given that you can’t just punch the things until they shake all their branches loose, hand saws are kind of a requirement for the task.

Source: Kyoto Shinbun

Feature Photo: Amazon JP, inset: Wikimedia Commons