In Japan, in the southwestern city of Fukuoka on the island of Kyushu, authorities were puzzled by the mysterious case of missing shoes, taken under cover of darkness from an elementary school. Police suspected a human thief, but what they found was stoatally different.
Police thought a shoe thief was on the loose at a kindergarten in southwestern Japan, until a security camera caught the furry culprit in action.
A weasel with a tiny shoe in its mouth was spotted on the video footage after police installed three cameras in the school in the prefecture of Fukuoka.
“It’s great it turned out not to be a human being,” Deputy Police Chief Hiroaki Inada told The Associated Press Sunday. Teachers and parents had feared it could be a disturbed person with a shoe fetish.
Japanese customarily take their shoes off before entering homes. The vanished shoes were all slip-ons the children wore indoors, stored in cubbyholes near the door.
At least the camera allowed the authorities to ferret out the suspect. They otter be proud of having cracked the case.
The Japanese weasel, or Itachi (イタチ), is similar to the common weasels of North America. Their populations have been reduced by human activities, especially by traffic on rural roads, as roadkill seems to be an issue. But as the Japanese countryside is becoming less populated as the younger generations are increasingly striking out for the bright lights of cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto, the Itachi are starting to reclaim some of their old habitat — and they are inquisitive little beasts. Indeed, their curious intelligence would earn them a badger of honor.
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But while the locals were relieved that some human creep wasn't stealing little kids' shoes for some twisted purpose, this particular shoe-stealing critter remains at large.
“We were so relieved,” Gosho Kodomo-en kindergarten director Yoshihide Saito told Japanese broadcaster RKB Mainichi Broadcasting.
The children got a good laugh when they saw the weasel in the video.
Although the stolen shoes were never found, the remaining shoes are now safe at the kindergarten with nets installed over the cubbyholes.
The weasel, which is believed to be wild, is still on the loose.
If they manage to capture the culprit, it's unlikely he'll be able to weasel his way out of an appropriate punishment.
Weasels of any kind can actually be good neighbors, as they are mousers extraordinaire, better than any cat. Here in our Great Land homestead, we have one, a Least Weasel, North America's smallest of the weasel family. Ours dens under our lilac bush, and now with snow on the ground, he has transformed into his winter white so that one can only see his eyes and tail tip against the snow. He even has a name — he is Herman the Ermine.
So far, at least, he hasn't stolen any shoes.
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