A Japanese Man Did Some Bad Stuff... And then, made it worse

追加: 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]I don't know.

[00:00:02]Yep, story time. That was me. My phone very aggressively got punched out of my hand, an impressive uppercut, a short while back. And so, here is the full version of what happened with that. And yes, first question out of the way, he was Japanese. Very, very many people have this idea that the Japanese are calm, beautiful, docile, peaceful people. And many of them are, but that's also not always the case. They're humans, just like anybody else. And some, like him, are out of control. But getting into the story itself and what happened. You see, in the end, him taking a swing at me was by far the least concerning part of what he did.

[00:00:49]Everything he did before and after that was the real shocker. You see, moments before he decided to very kindly punch my camera, I watched him do something considerably worse. It was the end of the day, a weekday here in Tokyo, and I was heading to the local train station. And as I went to go down a very wide set of completely empty stairs, there were two people. A woman heading down the stairs and a man heading up on opposite sides. He cut across, very, very obviously heading towards her, leaned his shoulder in, and shoved right through here here, her is the word, nearly knocking her down the stairs. Now, she kept going. I didn't. I stopped in my tracks at the top of the stairs, absolutely fuming and ready to talk to this guy. My Japanese friends immediately, who were with me, asked me, "Just just leave it be. Like, she's already gone. She kept going. He's obviously not normal. Just let it go. It's not a big deal. And most Japanese will do exactly that. They'll leave it be and they'll let it go, but you see, that's part of the reason I feel that these things continue to happen. The bump was very, very obviously intentional and incredibly hard. Like she made a little noise as it came out.

[00:02:14]And there is an entire subculture here in Japan just of these people. People who intentionally go into the stations and bump into other people as a form of stress relief.

[00:02:28]No jokes. There actually used to be YouTube channels completely dedicated to not only finding and chasing down, but bringing these people to justice by bringing them to the police. A set of YouTube channels, but they brought a little bit too much negative attention into Japan and to Japan Rail and all of this stuff and those channels were eventually done away with, but that itself feels like a very separate story.

[00:02:54]So, at this point in the story, I've stopped him. I said, "Hey, why why why why would you do that?" And his very, very first response was to threaten me with violence. Then so I did what felt like the smart move in the moment and I pulled out my cell phone and started rolling and almost immediately he resorted to punching the phone clear out of my hand and that brings us back to the beginning of the video. But what happened next is what really threw me off. Because as soon as I picked up my phone, I was like, "Oh, you that that No. No. You're you're very clearly a violent person and I called the Japanese police." As soon as I got on the phone with the police, he made a run for it. Understandable, he didn't have a case. There were multiple witnesses. I was on the phone with the police.

[00:03:45]He made a run for it. So, how did it all end? Well, you see, I stayed on the phone and maintained a decent distance from him and kept kind of reporting his location until he did something that I don't think anybody expected, which was he walked himself right into a koban, a Japanese police box. He was so focused on me that he didn't even notice that he was walking right towards the koban.

[00:04:12]They seemed to be waiting for him and just grabbed him. They held both of us for probably about 30 minutes getting sides of our stories, we had to fill out paperwork and all of that. And of course, at this juncture, this very fine gentleman makes yet one more attempt at doing something incredibly underhanded.

[00:04:34]You see, partway through this, I heard the police saying to him, "Hey, do we need to check the security cameras?

[00:04:41]Because if we catch that you've been lying to us, you're going to be in so so much more trouble." And later found out that he tried to claim that I had been violent with him first. But you remember earlier when I mentioned that my Japanese friends pleaded with me to not deal with any of this? Well, they were still with me. They walked with me the entire time so we stay safe and they were also all questioned by the police and all of us had the same story. And surprise, surprise, his story did not match and the police caught up on that pretty quickly. Very soon after this, he folded, he apologized, he begged me not to do the two things that I had the option to do in the moment, which was report him to his company or sue him.

[00:05:35]Either one of those likely would have left him completely losing his job. And that's a lot of responsibility to carry on yourself, to to know that somebody has lost their job and potentially, you know, if he has people to take care of in his life, that could make everything Sometimes it just takes that one little thing to push somebody over the edge into the very, very wrong direction and we all have hard enough lives as it is.

[00:06:01]So, I opted just to talk with him face-to-face and be like, "Hey, I simply didn't like seeing what you did and then you defaulted to continuing that energy here and like, come on. You you can't you can't just do that. Like, violence is not okay." And he was already in enough trouble with the police as it was and so, we left with him bowing, us shaking hands. The police requested that I fill out a like a a form that says that I will leave it at this, that I will not pursue legal action after this, I will not sue him, I waive my rights to sue from this point. And he signed something similar. Me and my group were left to go. He was held there to hopefully take a little more responsibility for the actions that he took and that is how the whole thing wrapped. Now, this is a very, rare experience. I've been in Japan I came here for the first time in 2005, moved here in 2007. We are we are months away from that being 20 years.

[00:07:11]It's gone by in a blink of an eye and I could easily count the number of experiences like this that I've even seen, but few doesn't mean zero. And especially after the pandemic, people's stresses just have gone gone higher and stayed higher. And so, for everybody who thinks that Japan is this perfectly safe, docile, unicorn nation utopia, just know that bad stuff exists and keep yourself safe.

[00:07:41]That's it. This isn't to make Japan look bad. These people exist anywhere in the world, and again, it's a rare case, but rare doesn't mean zero. So, I hope that a little bit of awareness helped. I hope that you enjoyed the story. I was fine.

[00:07:56]My phone was completely fine, by the way. I know somebody was going to ask, so thank you for that. In the end, we got a little bit of a story time to spend together. So, thank you, and we will see you again real soon. Also, more of these to come here on the minis channel, so feel free to follow along.