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The story
According to a report by NBC Nagasaki Broadcasting, a mother and her two daughters in Omura City, Nagasaki Prefecture, were awarded a letter of appreciation last month after noticing a barefoot woman knocking on their window in the early hours and working with police to bring her to safety. The original article doesn’t say who the woman was or what happened to her afterward. On 5ch, most commenters assumed she was an elderly dementia patient who had wandered off, though some raised concerns about the mother leaving her young children alone with a stranger while she went to flag down police, others were frustrated that the report never revealed the woman’s identity, and plenty of posts jokingly played up how much the story resembled a real-life ghost story.
9/8 (Tue) 6:42
NBC Nagasaki Broadcasting
It’s still dim out in the early hours of a summer morning. What if someone you didn’t recognize were knocking on your window right now? In Omura City, Nagasaki Prefecture, last month, a mother and her two daughters were awarded a letter of appreciation for protecting a ‘mysterious figure’ who appeared in their yard at dawn — saving her from what could have been a life-threatening situation.
Source: topics.smt.docomo.ne.jp / Original article here
What people said
Gotta be three knocks, right?
Five blinks of the brake lights is the signal for:
HA-GE-TE-I-RU — spelled out one syllable per blink: 'He's. Going. Bald.'
Knock knock knock, let me in
Knock knock knock, let me in
Knock knock knock, let me in
That's exactly how this song goes now~!
Should've sent one of the kids out to the street instead.
Probably just a wandering dementia patient… but if something felt off enough to notice, leaving it to two young daughters — one still in the early grades of elementary school, one in kindergarten — isn't okay either. Scary just picturing it.
This isn't the entertainment/sports board, so not many people here would get that reference.
Dementia?
Can't say — personal information and all…
Rough on the family too — can't even sleep soundly at night with that going on.
Sure, it's rough on the family, but it's also rough on complete strangers getting jolted awake at the crack of dawn like this.
If she could actually remember something like that, she probably wouldn't be wandering off in the first place.
"Whose funeral?"
"…Yours."
Re: #58
Rest in peace, Etsuko Ichihara. (the veteran actress famous for narrating Japan's eerie anthology TV series)
Except it wasn't a gentle knock-knock, more like a hard bang-bang-bang, so I was genuinely terrified.
Turns out she'd been mistreated by the daughter-in-law she lived with, ran off to go find her son, got lost on the way, and ended up asking us for help.
At that point, just go to the police, honestly.
Is 'butadon' actually the 'correct' reading?
The 'tondon' reading only caught on because some beef-bowl chains started pushing it during the whole BSE crisis, back when they were scrambling for alternatives — so I wouldn't exactly call that the 'right' one.
Was there even a decent horror show this year?
Once you're used to YouTube horror content, you just end up thinking 'why aren't they going in there?' the whole time.
And every single day it's, 'Wake up already! You're the one who died! IT'S YOU!'
some dementia patients lose all sense of restraint and can turn violent without holding back, so it's still scary either way…
There's still a tiny chance she's a serial killer who happened to develop dementia!
If it's an old man, it's just 'hey, the senile guy from next door is banging on my window' and that's the end of it. But if it's an old woman, all you feel is horror.
What people actually want to know is whether the old woman's identity got confirmed and whether she made it home.
Or, failing that, if her identity's still unknown, at least put her description in the article so people might be able to help identify her.
The fact that this article has none of that is just baffling.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
According to National Police Agency statistics, reports of people going missing due to dementia have been climbing year after year, and cases of unfamiliar elderly people showing up at private homes in the early morning or at night have been reported all over the country. The original article never confirms whether the woman in this case actually had dementia, and on the thread, replies like ‘that’s personal information’ kept coming up, so the discussion never got past speculation. Where opinions split was over whether it was right for the mother to leave a suspicious stranger alone with her young children while she went to lead police to the scene — some worried about the danger, while others defended the choice, arguing the situation made it obvious enough that the woman had dementia. There was also frustration that the woman’s identity and what happened to her afterward were never reported, with an undercurrent of unease about local news coverage that wraps itself up neatly as a ‘heartwarming story’ built around a letter of appreciation, without following through on what actually happened.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Express+) thread ‘[Nagasaki] Knock knock knock knock… The sound of someone knocking on the window at dawn — a “barefoot” woman behind the curtain‘.
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