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The story
In a schoolyard in Okayama’s Higashi Ward, a stocky man in his 50s walked up to a male high schooler with the lines “I used to play soccer too, ya know” and “Mind lending me that ball for a sec?” — and got reported as a suspicious person.
On 5ch, alongside skepticism that this even counts as an incident, commenters piled on comparisons to former pro players — “what’s left of Roberto Hongo” (a flamboyant street-soccer entertainer), “total Sergio Echigo” (the Brazilian-born football pundit famous in Japan) — and the thread also lit up with a running debate over why “suspicious person” reports always seem to describe someone stocky.
According to Okayama Prefectural Police, at around 2:35 PM on August 20, a man approached a male high schooler at a sports ground near Shiono, Seto-cho, Higashi Ward, Okayama City.
(Description of the individual: male, late 40s to 50s, graying hair, stocky build, navy work clothes)
■ Circumstances at the time
Source: news.jp / Original article here
What people said
A nice little cash cow — lets them log some investigation expenses
A drunk, scruffy foreigner bursting into a kids' soccer practice — even Roberto Hongo would get reported on the spot if he tried that today
Roberto Hongo used to be an ace-caliber player for the Brazil national team, you know
He's on a whole different level from some guy who just dabbled in soccer
More like Sergio Echigo
Should be "wa," not "ga"
With that particle it really sounds like the ball's the only friend he's got
Juggling's all about how little effort you can get away with — once you can do a few dozen, going further is basically pointless lol
If he'd had a full head of hair and a lean build, he'd have walked free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nDCMEZxifE
Nah, for baseball it'd be this guy
https://www.nikkansports.com/m/baseball/news/1603090_m.html
No crime, technically.
Just "suspicious" (cue nervous sweat)
Is being a middle-aged guy a crime now? (´；ω；｀)
Same with shorts, same with hoodies
The media's been greenlighting and airing this whole "bash middle-aged men" thing for a while now.
Why never lean and muscular?
With middle-aged guys, appearance is basically the tell for whether someone knows where the line is or not
Build, hairstyle, whatever — if someone can't keep themselves groomed, they're… that type
Even if someone's dying right in front of you, better to just walk on by
Yeah, help a drunk passed out on the street and you'll probably get accused of stealing his wallet anyway
Can't really blame them — there's always a chance it's a burglar scoping the place out
That's how they mark mailboxes to flag houses where a woman lives alone
Fair enough if it were an elementary schooler, but calling this "suspicious" for a male high schooler is a stretch
Guess he just looked suspicious
Ah I see
So his look just didn't scream "I used to play soccer too, ya know," huh lol
Plenty of former legends are stocky too lol
Look at one, smile at one, and you'll get reported
👶: "Ew, creepy"
That's kemari (an ancient Japanese ball-kicking court game)
"I used to play too" (back in the Heian era, he means)
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/DgZCnZLUEAA-I3G.jpg
He was in that Slendertone ab-toner commercial lol
Sugimura Taizo (TV personality/ex-lawmaker) was in it too
Background and Key Points
Some things I looked up for background weren’t in the article at all, so I’ll rely only on what’s given.
Japan’s “fushinsha” (suspicious person) reporting system is the informal backbone of school-area safety here: schools and neighborhood watch networks push out alerts whenever an adult’s contact with a child feels off, and prefectural police, as in this Okayama Higashi Ward case, log and publicize even encounters with no crime, no threat, and no request beyond borrowing a soccer ball. That practice is why so many of these bulletins read like non-events to outsiders — the bar is “made someone uncomfortable,” not “broke a law,” and the 5ch crowd’s own question, “what even counts as suspicious these days,” reflects a real gap between what the alert system flags and what average readers would consider incident-worthy.
Notably, the thread didn’t split over whether the report was justified at all — nearly everyone agreed a man politely asking to join or borrow a ball from a high schooler is a thin basis for a police bulletin. The actual fault line was narrower: whether the man’s stocky, unkempt look was itself grounds for suspicion, versus the counterpoint that plenty of retired star athletes (the running Roberto Hongo and Sergio Echigo comparisons) are stocky too, so build says nothing about intent.
What outside readers will likely miss is that this bulletin cost the man nothing legally — Japan has no loitering or “suspicious approach” statute triggered here, per the thread’s own “no crime, technically” exchange. The police release exists purely as a community advisory, meaning the subject’s description and vague conduct are now public with no charge ever filed or contemplated. The article also never says whether the boy actually handed over the ball or how the encounter ended.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “Suspicious person incident in Okayama: stocky man in his 50s approaches male high schooler with lines like ‘I used to play soccer too, ya know’ and ‘Mind lending me the ball for a bit?’”.
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