In the end, he ran into the very thing he was trying to get away from.
There’s an adventurous, romantic appeal to dropping all the drudgery of day-to-day life and heading north to Hokkaido. Japan’s northernmost prefecture is a land of vast, open spaces and rugged natural beauty, the sort of place that might make one wonder how we could ever allow ourselves to slip into mundane, monotonous routines.
So, in a way, it wasn’t surprising when a 27-year-old office worker from Kanagawa Prefecture, located to the south of Tokyo, was asked for what purpose he’d come all thew way to Hokkaido town of Wakannai, the northernmost city in all of Japan, and answered:
“I came to Hokkaido to escape reality.”
What was odd, though, was that he was completely naked at the time.
At around 11:30 a.m. on September 30, police in Wakannai received a call from someone saying they’d seen a naked man walking beside Route 238, which runs along the coast on the eastern side of town and then around Cape Soya. Officers were dispatched to the scene, where they promptly identified the man based on the physical description that they’d been provided with (naked guy).
As can be seen in the above image, the monument and scenery at Cape Soya, the man’s presumably intended destination, do have a certain otherworldly surreal beauty to them. However, while it might look like something from another world, Cape Soya is still very much a part of reality, and thus subject to reality’s laws. The officers placed the man under arrest for public indecency, and he has admitted to the charges, saying “It is the truth that I was naked on the side of the road.”
▼ It was going to be hard to talk his way out of trouble when he’d been caught red-handed, while exposing the completion of several of his other body parts too.
While the man’s choice of location in which to get naked was ill-advised, at least his timing wasn’t so bad, in terms of weather. Hokkaido in general, and Wakannai in particular, can get very cold as we get farther away from summer, but Japan is experiencing an unusually warm autumn this year, and the daytime high in Wakannai on the day the man was picked up was just under 21 degrees Celsius (69.8 degree Fahrenheit).
The police say that they are currently investigating the man’s motives, which seems a little odd since he already told them what he was trying to do, even if in the end reality came crashing down on him anyway.
Source: Hokkaido Cultural Broadcasting via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin, Tenki.jp
Top image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Pakutaso
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