71-year-old man who 'wanted to look cool' robs 63 houses, treats strangers to sushi

When caught committing crimes for economic gain in Japan, it’s common for the accused to say their motive was to obtain money for seikatsuhi, or “lifestyle expenses.” It’s a broad, nebulous term, in that it can mean the absolute essentials of a roof over your head and meager meals on your table, but can also be used to indicate the sundry costs of maintaining a desired lifestyle beyond the bare necessities as well.

However, a man who’s been arrested in Fukuoka Prefecture on charges of dozens of burglaries also had another reason he kept on stealing: he wanted to look cool.

Over the last year and a half or so, if you’d been drinking or dining out in the vicinity of the Fukuoka Prefecture town of Kitakyushu, you might have had the seemingly good fortune of sharing the space with a very generous older gentleman, 71-year-old resident Kazunori Inagaki. On occasion, Inagaki would go out to expensive sushi restaurants or bars and announce that he was picking up the tab for every single customer in the place. These bursts of largesse would sometimes cost Inagaki 300,000 yen a pop, but he did it with a smile on his face.

With such a penchant for exuberant extravagance, you might expect Inagaki to be a banker, financier, or aging show biz star. However, he reportedly claimed to be a strawberry farmer, and even owned a compact kei car with the license plate 1583, which can be read as ichigoyasan, meaning “strawberry farmer.”

Now if this has you thinking that strawberry farming is a fast path to living the high life in Japan, there’s something you should know before you quit your office job, throw away your business suits, and replace them with denim overalls. Inagaki has, in fact, never worked a day in his life growing strawberries. What he did spend a lot of time doing, though, was robbing people, and not just in Fukuoka. Investigators say that between September of 2023 and October of 2024 Inagaki broke into 63 homes in Fukuoka and the neighboring prefectures of Oita and Kumamoto, with the total haul from the burglaries coming to roughly 9.3 million yen.

▼ That’ll buy you a lot of sushi.

Inagaki primarily targeted homes in rural agricultural communities, breaking in during the day when the owners would be out tending to their fields, and stealing cash and gift certificates (in Japan, gift certificates are available for an especially wide range of retailers and products, and there’s also a secondary market where they can be converted to cash and then resold). Inagaki’s victims included a 76-year-old woman in the town of Nagomi, Kumamoto Prefecture, from whose home he stole approximately 140,000 yen last October. This incident led to his initial arrest, at which time he claimed he “had no memory of doing that sort of thing.” The ensuing investigation then turned up evidence of Inagaki breaking into the home of a 91-year-old woman in Bungo Ono, Oita Prefecture in July of 2024, and he’s now changed his tune and admitted to all charges he’s facing.

During questioning, Inagaki said that when he started his crime spree, it was because he felt like the welfare/pension payments he was receiving weren’t enough for him to get by on, but when asked about using the money he’d stolen to treat entire fancy sushi restaurants and bars to dinner and drinks said “I paid for them because I wanted to look cool.” 

Of course, he never mentioned the fact that he was financing his coolness by robbing elderly women and others.

Source: Nitele News via Yahoo! Japan News via Jin, TBS News Dig

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