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The story
A 57-year-old female employee at the Nagaizumi Town office in Shizuoka Prefecture was dismissed after taking home roughly 20,000 public documents slated for disposal without authorization. It also came to light that she used the backs of the pages as scratch paper to print her hobby mystery novels on the town’s copy machine, sparking discussion on 5ch with comments like “Printing on the town’s copier? Wouldn’t just buying the book be cheaper?” and “So cheap…,” along with speculation about how it was discovered and what her motive was.
“I didn’t want to spend my own money” — Employee dismissed for taking home roughly 20,000 discarded public documents without permission, used them as scratch paper to print hobby mystery novels = Nagaizumi Town, Shizuoka
Published 8/25 (Tue) 19:12
Shizuoka Broadcasting System (SBS)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
41 Anonymous Donburako 2026/03/20 (Fri) 05:35:08.12 ID:Az+IKYP60
Re: #2
If 70% of the raw material for window sashes disappears,
then sash makers' work drops 70% too, right?
43 Anonymous Donburako 2026/03/20 (Fri) 05:42:48.27 ID:Az+IKYP60
Re: #42
If materials drop 70%, production drops 70% too, so the work drops 70%,
and you cut staff by 70% as well.
51 Anonymous Donburako 2026/03/20 (Fri) 05:55:14.23 ID:zlyhQQA/0
Re: #46
Because we've never been affected by it before.
So, mind if I save this?
I'm hoping you're not lying to me.
A 70% drop means if you had 100 orders a month, that falls to just 30-something.
That's easy enough to verify later, so I'm saving this properly — that okay with you?
52 Anonymous Donburako 2026/03/20 (Fri) 05:58:58.36 ID:Az+IKYP60
Re: #51
Sure, go ahead.
So cheap…
Since it's worried about work stuff, isn't that more of a "yaku-neko" (drug cat) thing?
Not broke, just stingy.
It's the people who actually have money who turn into misers.
What about in Azerbaijan? Or the Republic of the Congo?
It says "town's," not "city's," so it's presumably the copier at Nagaizumi town hall. Black-and-white is probably under 1 yen a page, but I wonder what it all added up to.
It's a per-page contract — black-and-white is probably under 2 yen a page.
And honestly, if she didn't care about owning the actual book and a copy was fine, she could've just taken photos and read them on a tablet.
It says "the town's copier." So she was siphoning off the town's budget. Dismissal seems fair.
It literally says "without permission," lol. At least ask first, lol. Not that it would've worked anyway, lolol.
The point is she was using tax money to copy stuff for her personal hobby.
Taking home discarded public documents without permission is bad enough, but this is just as bad.
That's a terrible analogy, even as analogies go.
This reporter refers to the town office as "the town," so "the town's copier" just means the office copier — free to use. But using a ton of paper would look suspicious, so apparently that's why she used the backs of the discarded documents instead.
It's about the copier managed by Nagashima town [sic], lol. You'd notice if the paper ran low, but you wouldn't notice the ink, right? lol
But it cost her literally zero yen, lol. Effort aside, lolol.
It's a copy of a book she borrowed from the library. And since it's on scrap paper, it must be brutal to read.
You actually need to file a request just to make a copy. Permission's only granted for research purposes, though — without authorization it's copyright infringement (violation of the reproduction right).
I bet the seniors and coworkers who already retired and got away clean were doing the exact same thing.
Not everyone here is necessarily a Nagaizumi resident — nearby Gotemba and Numazu cities do have digital systems.
If the logic that "accidents caused by things like cars or smartphones aren't the thing's fault, it's the fault of the person using it" holds up, then this isn't really about digitization either — it comes down to "the person who did this is the one at fault." Though saying that to someone whose values have been thoroughly brainwashed by digital-absolutism (more a religion than a philosophy) — efficiency, convenience, savings, and all that — would probably go in one ear and out the other.
She got taken down by the next office queen bee who wanted to pull the same trick herself. Give it a few years and it'll probably happen again.
Nothing more annoying than someone hogging the copier.
Background and Key Points
Japanese municipal offices are required to dispose of internal paperwork through controlled channels — shredding contracts or supervised destruction — precisely because “discarded” documents at a town hall routinely contain residents’ personal information: family register entries, tax records, welfare applications, and the like. Nagaizumi is a small town office in Shizuoka Prefecture, the kind of local government body (chihō kōkyō dantai) whose employees are civil servants bound by the Local Public Service Act, under which unauthorized removal of records and misuse of office equipment for private purposes are disciplinary offenses that can trigger immediate dismissal (chōkai kaishoku), independent of any criminal charge. That distinction matters here: nothing in the reporting suggests she was prosecuted for theft or copyright infringement — she was fired administratively.
The thread’s actual disagreement wasn’t about whether dismissal was warranted; almost no one defended her. It split on how to read the “cheapness” — some treated it as a quirky, almost sympathetic case of thriftiness (comparing her to someone driving across town to save on eggs), while others insisted the money-saving angle was a distraction from the real violation, using town resources and mishandled records, and pushed back on framing this as mere frugality.
What the posts gloss over is the copyright layer, raised only briefly (#135): under Japan’s Copyright Act, libraries may reproduce portions of a book only for a patron’s own research use, not full copies for personal keeping, so what she was printing on scrap document backs may itself have been an independent infringement — a second violation the “cheap old lady” framing obscures entirely.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News+) thread “[Shizuoka] “I didn’t want to spend my own money” — 57-year-old female employee dismissed for taking home roughly 20,000 discarded public documents without permission, printed mystery novels on scrap paper — Nagaizumi Town.”
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