November 8, 2022 • 48 mins
The "out of the ordinary" case, as described by our guest, Amber Keating, happened in 1989 in Fukushima, Japan where a deceased man was found in the collection tank of a squat toilet. The story has become a mainstay of mystery blogs, reddit posts, and youtube videos, but authentic sources for research are hard to come by. Regardless, it's a worthy mystery. If it's true, how and why did the man crawl into the small, gross pipes?
Guest Amber Keating is a licensed clinical social worker and mental health clinician. Find Amber on instagram @amber.says.shine and https://www.pacificmft.com/amber-keating.
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Sources:
https://inf.news/en/world/8327e4d966753258ab639433a5a25c97.html https://medium.com/illumination/the-man-under-the-toilet-cff342c69b27 https://inf.news/en/world/8327e4d966753258ab639433a5a25c97.html https://daydaynews.cc/en/international/724025.html https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrimeDiscussion/comments/lyrbq9/a_young_japanese_man_was_found_dead_in_a_septic/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9ed5C39riE&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8giz1eNKznE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SXLFSxZjmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPnjq2yw9E https://medium.com/illumination/the-man-under-the-toilet-cff342c69b27
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
February 28th, 1989.
Media Koji Fukushima, Japan.
A school teacher returned to her dormto settle in for the night
in her private bathroom.
Something cut her off a man's shoe downin the pipe of the old fashioned toilet.
Upon investigate,the teacher made a horrid discovery.
(00:23):
A dead body of a manwas stuck in the small septic tank.
A truly strange case unfolded,and every time investigators collected
a new piece of evidence, it only raisedmore questions than answers.
And as you can imagine, rumorsbegan to swirl.
The case has only recently gotten
(00:43):
international attentionthanks to the viral nature of the story.
But what really happened
and will we ever know?
This is a study of strange.
(01:13):
Good evening.
Thank you for listening.
I wanted to make one quick announcement.
Tonight I am going to keep housekeepingto a minimum and save that for the end.
The announcement is I have beenresearching a couple of UFO episodes.
One will be next week. Another one?
I don't know when it will be.
Maybe a month or so from now,but it made me realize
it might be fun to do similar episodesof what I did with Terrifying Tales
(01:34):
or Halloween specials of peoplesharing personal stories.
So if you have an account,if you've witnessed something strange
and unidentified in the sky,I would love to have you on the show.
Pleaseemail me a study of strange at gmail.com.
Send me your storiesor some information about an experience
you had involving a UFOor unidentified aerial phenomena.
(01:58):
I would love to have you on the show.
I'm not surewhen that episode will be made.
It may be months from now,
but I would love to start collecting thosenow and I am looking forward to it.
So thank you.
And now enjoy a very normal story ofa dead body being found in a septic tank.
Super normal.
Not. Not strange at all. Enjoy.
(02:19):
Welcome to the show.
I'm Michael May.
And with me today,my guest is Amber Keating.
Who is Amber, I should probablyhave you describe what you do because I'll
probably misinterpret her or representactually who and what you are.
So why don't you tell everybodywhat you do for a living?
Yes. Hello.
I am a licensed clinical social worker
(02:41):
and that means I am a mental healthclinician.
So I do therapy for a living.
It's a great trick to use at a partyto make people go away.
Oh, yes
and yes.
So I've been doing it for for a long time.
I'm in private practice
now, and I mainly work with peoplewho have, like anxiety and trauma.
(03:04):
Super fun stuff.
Yeah, well, yes, well, well,thank you for doing what you do,
because that is an important thing.
And I wanted to have you on this episodebecause as the as the audience
is just heard in the intro,this one's a bit of a doozy.
And it involves a little bit of a triggerwarning here.
It involves a dead body, which is kind ofcommon for the crime elements in my show.
(03:26):
So that's not unusual, sadly.
But this does involve some gross thingsbecause it does involve human waste.
But there also we will get into theorieslater on, but it might involve some kind
of like fetishes or voyeurismor a lot of different things like that.
And I honestly wanted somebody
that understands the human behaviorand psyche better than I do on the show.
(03:48):
So thank you so much for for coming onin this very weird, bizarre story.
I'm a big fan of human behavior, so it's.
And I will
make a couple of points herebefore I dove into the story.
So this test took place in Japan,
and I did ask a friend of minewho taught in Japan
for a few years to help just make sureI pronounce things correctly.
(04:12):
And he actually pointed outthat there are different ways
to pronounce the names and places in this,depending on where you're from.
So he wasn't that much help.
I was hoping for like one singular help.
So I've tried my best.
So if I do pronouncesomething incorrectly, I do apologize.
I am trying my best, but I mispronouncethings even from where I'm from.
So it's going to happen.
(04:32):
And the other thingis, most of the crime stories
I do on my show, I like to really gooverboard with research.
I like to find a lot of books and articlesand and hopefully it's a topic
that a lot of journalists that are betterat being journalists than me have
actually done researchthat I can sort of latch onto.
This story is a bitmore of like an Internet sensation.
(04:54):
It's one of these thingsthat's passed around on Reddit.
There's a ton of YouTube videos about it,but there's not actually a
lot of research in terms of like articlesor books or things like that.
So I've had to kind of pick and choosewhat sources
I feel seemed to be more realisticto kind of weed out some bad things.
(05:16):
And I've also I did find some articles,but they're all from China or Vietnam.
I did not find any articlesfrom the United States.
So there's a bit of like a translike a Google translate
or a version of that that kind of helped.
So if anybody out therelistening has more information or hears
me say things that,you know to be incorrect and you have
(05:36):
some sort of valid resource for that,reach out to me at a study of stranger
at Gmail dot com. I would love to hearthat and do a follow up.
Also some of the articlesI just find this fascinating.
This isn't actually that important,
but a lot of the articles,they get the names different.
And even when you like readabout this on Reddit or YouTube
or all these other sitesthat have interesting mysteries,
(05:56):
the names are always different
and that kind of puts up a red flagfor me of like, Wait, is this even true?
Am I going to find out thatthis is some hoax online?
It wouldn't really surprised me,but at the same time,
there's enough out there that I'm like,No, no, no, this is true.
I think people are just not gettingthe best resources
to corroborate the spelling of a nameor something like that.
(06:17):
And also the Chinese articles,
I think they have a Chinese versionof the Japanese name.
So it's, it's like close enough,but it's in Chinese. So.
Yeah, just interestinglittle little details. Yeah.
And also one more thing,Amber and I apologize.
Normally, I do recreations.
I don't know if you listen to theany of the episodes or not.
(06:37):
You don't have toyou don't don't feel obligated to.
But I normally do some recreationswhich are a lot of fun,
and I tried to write them for this episodeand they all seem
to be a little inappropriatebecause of the like content.
So I am not doing recreationsbecause it all seems like I was making
fun of potential victims and I was like,I don't want to do that.
(06:58):
It wasn't my intention,but it just kind of comes off that way.
So we will not be doing recreationstonight.
Everybody, I apologize.
So yeah, let's get into it again.
Me getting into the crazy story here.
So this happened on Sundayevening on February 28th, 1989,
and the story takes place in MiccosukeeVillage in the Fukushima prefecture,
(07:20):
which everybody knows because of thethe nuclear fallout in Fukushima, Japan.
The village mergedwith other villages in the area
in 2005 to form a city called Tamura.
And this area was evacuatedwhen the power plant lockdown happened.
Obviously,our story takes place before that. But
yeah, that
that is the locationof where this takes place.
(07:42):
So there is a elementary schoolin the village called a W Village
Elementary School and a teacher namedMummy Tanaka, who is 23 years old.
She came back to her dorm.
The teacher living quarters around 5 p.m.
on this Sundayand she had taken four days off.
She had a little herself, a little vacay.
(08:02):
So she came back on Sunday
and when she got homeshe went to use the toilet like we do.
And the toilet was in ruralJapan at the time.
And it may even still be like that today.I don't know.
They were using squat toilets
and for listeners in the United States,we're not as used to this,
but it's essentiallya little hole in the ground.
You squat over to relieve yourself.
(08:25):
And we're going to talk aboutplumbing a little bit.
I apologize, Amberand everybody listening,
but it is really important for the story.
So the squat toilet goes down,there's a pipe underneath it
that's about 18 inches longthat goes out into a little kind of like
when you read about this online,they keep telling us septic
tank, it's not a septic tank.
It's just like a collection tankand it's U-shaped.
(08:45):
So it kind of goesunderground a little bit.
And then on the outside of the dorm roomwall outside, there's
another pipe that comes upand it can open up.
And they come out and they clean itevery so often by attaching
some sort of hugeutility device of some kind to it.
So she she went to use the toiletand when she was getting ready to use it,
she saw in the pipe was a man's shoeand she lives alone.
(09:10):
It's her private bathroom.
No one else uses the bathroom.
The shoe,I don't think probably could even fit down
into the pipe from the toilet itself.
I'm just assuming on that.
But she was very weirded out bythis as one would be.
So she goes outside
and checksto the other end of the pipe and it's open
(09:32):
and she looks insideand she sees human feet.
So she immediately panics.
She gets guys from the guys dorm,she gets friends from the girls dorm.
She gets all these peopleto come out and check this.
And, you know, just this is just weird.
So who knows how I would behavein this situation.
And everybody sees the personthey're kind of grossed out.
(09:53):
There's no response.
And they eventually call the police,the authorities
now the toilet.
I got to give some
some sighs to this because, again,this is important for the story.
But again, it's a U-shaped.
There are visuals in my show notes.
There are visualsthat have been shared across online.
So check out my show notesto actually see some links for this.
(10:14):
The pipes, the pipe from outside
that goes vertically down is 42 inchestall.
And it's 14 inches wide.
I don't know that in the metric system,
but I should have looked upcentimeters as well.
And inside the sort of bottom partthat goes
horizontally is 49 inches longand then it's 18 inches.
I went to the toilet. It's small.
(10:35):
The point of this is it's small.Check out the visual references.
Everybody just because it it helps.
It's not easy for a personto get in there.
And that's what the first strange bitabout this case is.
How could a person get in to a pipethat is that small?
Because you can't extend yourself.
You can't turn aroundonce you're in there.
Also being the U-shape, it's like,how do you get from the vertical part
(10:57):
into the horizontal? Like it's. Just.
Very, very bizarre and small and cramped.
And when the authorities showed up,
they immediatelycould tell that the man inside was dead.
And so they tried to grab on to him.
I'm assuming, by the legs,because that's the part by the opening,
they can't get him out and they try
and they're trying to tryand they can't get him out.
They call the fire department.
(11:18):
Fire department shows up.
They can't get him out.
Eventually they have to get an excavatorto dig up the pipe.
They lift it up with a crane.
They try to get him out again.
They can't get him out still.
So they had to cut the pipeopen to get this man out.
Was it? Yeah. Yeah. And
so the body was found.
(11:40):
Once they cracked it open, they saw him.
He was in a fetal position on his back.
So he is I wish everybody could see me.
It's kind of hard to. Like.
Do this, but yeah, Amberstrying to act it out as well.
So he's on his back.
And his feet because of how short it is.
49 inches his legs are basically like upin the fetal position area
(12:00):
so that so yeah. There you go. Thereyou go.
I was getting in itand on his chest is his jacket.
So he's folded his jacket
like very nicely and put it on his chest.
It was about I think it was negativetwo degrees Celsius when they found him
or that was the average temperature.I forget what the exact thing was.
(12:21):
But it's pointis, it's very cold in this area of Japan.
This time of year. It is winter.
And he didn't have shoes on because therewas that one shoe in the tank,
the other shoe which we willget into a little bit more in a moment.
But the other shoe is nowhere to be found.
It's not outside the pipe.
It's not outside on the ground.
It's not on his body. It's nowhere.
(12:42):
Now, there are conflicting reports,depending on what you read.
Some say that the guy was naked withthe jacket on, is on his chest.
Most of the articles, though,say his pants were on.
He just was sort of shirtlessand jacket on his chest.
So I don't know what it is,but but there you go.
Now some details immediatelycome into question,
(13:04):
as I'm sure you probably have questions,too, Amber.
So many. So many.
So the average Japanese
man at the time is had a width of shoulderwidth of 16 inches
the pipe to getin, had a diameter of 14 inches.
So it's not impossible.
I can I can even kind of make myselfsmaller right now and squeeze
(13:26):
into something, but it's not, again,not easy and you got to go straight down.
And they kind of do a quick 90 degreeturn to get into this pipe.
So how did somebody fit in?
There is the first question.
The other
question is, if he's shoeless,why is there one in the tank
and the one in the tank is up by his headbecause it was underneath the toilet part
(13:47):
and he would have hadto put that shoe in first.
So that's just a bizarre thing ofwhy put your shoe in there
and the other one is missing.
So the forensics team had to cleanthe man twice.
I can only imagine.
And they concluded that the cause of death
was suffocationbrought on by cold and cramp ness.
(14:10):
Now, most of these things,if you're on Reddit
or all these other sitesthat share stories
like this, most of the time it's reportedas he freeze to death
and then people come upwith little conspiracies and theories
that like, well,if he was in a tank like this,
he would die from suffocation firstbecause of all the methane
and all this kind of stuff.
He would he would die from breathingbefore he would freeze to death.
(14:33):
But he actually did die by suffocationfirst.
And people kind of have that incorrect.
And I got thatfrom one of the newspaper articles.
So he died of suffocationbrought on by cold and dampness.
Again, not the best sources, though,so I'm happy to be wrong on that.
But so that's kind ofmy deduction in this.
There are no signs of trauma,meaning like he had a couple of bruises
(14:54):
on like an elbow or something,but he wasn't all cut up
and his face wasn't beat up and scrapesand everything else.
So you can imagine from tryingto fit into a small, cramped pipe,
but because he didn't have the trauma,
it's kind of quickly assumedthat he got in there himself.
They also believe that he was deadfor about two days. Or.
(15:15):
So, depending on the source, eitherthe authorities
or Yumi Tanaka identified the deceased man
if she identified him firstor if authorities identified him first.
I don't know if it really matters,but the point is, is
they were able to identify him and Yumi,the girl knew him
and his name was Kono Naoki.
(15:38):
And he was 26 years old
and he was a reputable young man.
He was a sales manager at the NuclearPower Plant Maintenance Company.
He was a member of local clubsand around town.
And people generally really liked himand thought highly of him.
And he was depending again on sources.
(15:59):
I have to say that a lot todayhe was either friends with Yumi
or Friendly, like some sort of
an associate of humans of some kind,an acquaintance.
That's a better, better word there.
Word on the street is that he helped herwhen another man
had been harassing her,like via phone calls and stuff like that.
(16:21):
Apparently, Kono Naoki had supported herand helped her and her boyfriend
kind of deal with whateverthe harassment is.
I don't have a lot of details on that,but that does come up in a
lot of the research over and over againthat he was of help to her.
So yeah, I can't confirm how closethey were, but they did know each other.
Now, when Kono Naoki was found,
(16:43):
it pointed to him
having gotten into the septic
tank on purpose, which is already kind ofwhat I'm leaning towards.
But just to say it vocally out loud,he was not forced.
They found his carnearby, unlocked keys left in the car.
Kono had
told his fatherthat he was running errands on the 24th.
(17:06):
So that's four days prior to being found.
And he wasn't reported missing
because his family was quick to point outhe's 26, he's an adult.
Like he goes outsometimes and goes places.
So we're not going to report.
A missing is 26 years old.
And all of this calculating,all of this kind of everything adds up
(17:26):
to kind of a simple conclusionthat the police came to, which is he
got in the tank by himself on purposeto peep potentially.
It was that he was a peeper.
He wanted to spy on a womanusing the toilet.
And he got in there and got stuckand that's why he died.
However, there are some in the town,including his parents,
(17:50):
that petitioned the policeto reopen the case and investigate it
more because of a lot of the bizarrethings involved.
And the policerefused to investigate any further.
So the case was kind of closed that
he just died because he got stucktrying to peep on somebody.
Oh, so Amber, there's the basis of it.
There's there is some more to this,but there's the the general. How.
(18:13):
Set up for this story.
So do you have any questions, anythingyou want to bring up right now before.
We go northwest?
I don't think so.
I'm just I'm so fascinated.
Like I really
want to know what happened to this guy.
You've asked him like, dude,what are you doing?
Yeah, what are you doing?
Yeah. Yeah.
(18:34):
So here's where it gets weird.
And if it's not weird already
weird. Yeah. Here's.
Here's where it gets weirder.
See, that's a better translation.That's good.
His other shoe was found
a couple hundred meters away by a stream.
Oh, yeah.
(18:54):
It's not right there. It's not by the car.
It's not on the other side of the pipe.
It's hundreds of meters away.
Very strange.
And again, I already said this earlier,but like the one shoe in the tank
would have had to go in first. Hmm.
So the shoes are a bigkind of piece of evidence
to this case to just make it very odd and.
(19:16):
And doesn't make itso succinct to just be like,
oh, this guy just climbed in therebecause he wanted to peep and died.
Now you got.
It. I wasn't going to bring this up yet,but I kind of think
I will just talk about the shoes.
So there are some theories that suggest
that hemight have been chased by somebody.
(19:37):
And the shoe is a big part of that,because what if you're running,
you're trying to get away from somebody,
your shoe falls off,but you just keep going.
And then the tank could have beenjust the first hiding place
he saw is like, oh, they're not goingto look into a waste receptacle.
They're not going to do that.
So I'm just going to jump in there.
Doesn't explain everything.
(19:59):
Yeah, yeah.
But it definitely. Does.
Like it's one of the only theoriesthat actually kind of explains the shoe
being found so far away. Right.
And do you think Tom, Cinderella was.
Yeah, Peeping Tom. Cinderella two.
That's a movie.
That's a movie right there.
The Peeping Tom.
Cinderella does well in Hollywood.
(20:21):
We get a picture that is going to be goingto be submitted to it.
There's a Netflix specialin there somewhere.
So the size of the tank in the pipes,I listed them before
and everybody can kind of goin my shownotes to see them.
But his shoulders were two incheswider than the diameter,
so we would add a squeeze in there.
His family wanted to sort ofput this to the test because she does he
(20:44):
they don't believe that he is a peepingtom and would have crawled
into something full of human wastejust to peep on somebody.
So they actually bought the same pipe
to test it outand they had somebody about the size
of Kono Naoki try to climb inand he couldn't do it.
They could not replicatesomebody getting into the pipe.
(21:06):
Wow. So that brings up the question,
did he climb in there himself. Or.
Was he forced.
Wow. Dun dun dun dun. Uh.
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that's audibletrail dot com slash strange Thank you.
There are no shortage of theoriesfloating around.
(22:36):
One of my favorite things in this,because this is all like online research.
There's no books or anything.
Again, reading comments, is it?
I always I basically try to refrainfrom ever
reading comments of anything onlinebecause it's terrible.
But I was trying just to find moreinformation and like, does
anybody else have a linkto somewhere else?
And occasionally you would come acrosssomething that did help in my research.
(22:58):
But there are a lot of comments of peoplethat have theories
that I feel likethey'll read the first paragraph
and not the rest of the story
because they'll be like,Oh, this is definitely what happened.
And it's like,Oh, if you just kept reading,
you would find thatthat's that's not the case.
But there isthere are some, some interesting theories
that people put put forward.And I'll just go on to those now.
(23:18):
Or do you want to jump into a theory?
Amber I feel like I've just talkedto the whole time.
I'm just like, I'm flabbergasted. Yeah.
What? That's
what I'm going to do.
I'm going to change my mind here. I'mgoing to do this a little bit different.
Then I'm going to go oversome of the other theories a bit later.
What I want to talk about with youspecifically is
some people online have suggested
(23:40):
there are interestingfetishes in the world
and there is a stereotype with Japanwhere there are
sort of like weird or uniquefetishes in Japan.
And I do not judge anybody for that.
But there areI actually looked up terms for this.
So there's voyeurism, which is part of it.
I think everybody knows about voyeurism,
but there's also an I don't knowif I'm going to say this right.
(24:00):
Coprophilia.
That sounds right coprophilia Okay.
And that's excitement and interestin feces is the way I read it.
Is that did youdo you ever do you have to study.
Things like that when you. Were.
I doing ADR? Oh, really.
I know it.
I've never worked with anyone.Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not my specialty, but. Yes, yes.
(24:23):
I actually wish that would be amazing,especially for this podcast
to be like, Oh my, my friendis a specialist in coprophilia
and there's also cluster philia,which I probably said that wrong too.
But I think everybody can kind of deducewhat that is.
It's a it's an interestor sexual interest in confinement.
So there are various fetishes.
They kind of may lead somebody to want
(24:47):
to actually put themselves in a
potentially life threatening,dangerous and gross situation.
I wouldn't do that
myself. Right.
But really to each their own, I suppose.
Each their own. Yeah, I guess so.
And when I was looking into thisand I may have
(25:08):
this may have been a comment I wish I hadwrote down where I saw this list.
Either it could have been my idea,but I may not have been smart enough
to come up with this.
I wrote this down, though,is that the shoe could have been
put in first as a way,just like block his face when she's
using the toilet or even hide it,because I think it was a black shoe.
So it like helps hide himin the shadows of the pipes, potentially.
(25:33):
Well, that interesting onebecause I was trying to think like, why?
Why on earth wouldn'tthe shoe go in first?
What? Yeah, yeah. That
does not compute.
But that
seems feasible.
If feasible, I don'tI still don't know if that's right or not,
but it's something it'ssome kind of guess.
(25:54):
And why the shoe was in there,
the jacket, he folded up the jacketand sort of tucked it.
If you can see me kind of liketucked up like this across the him.
And I mean, do you have any ideas on that?
Because I'm all out of ideas.
No. I mean, I'll just saywe watched the mummy
the other day and saw the original. Yeah.
(26:16):
And that, that, that is just the imagethat it's conjuring up
is the person going into the sarcophagus.
Yes. And the Boris Karloff oneis that when you're talking about.
Yes, I see Boris Karloff.
Yeah, I think it's Boris. Carrie probably
I'm terrible with.
Yeah name.
(26:37):
Is. Some people have brought up thatlike he did that to keep warm but I'm like
but he's not wearing ring it
I mean yeah you get ita little bit of warmth from that.
Could it be to keep it cleanwhich may lead in
to like the hiding theoryof like hiding from somebody
if he just like took it offto try to keep it
clean and go in thereor he was just trying to keep it clean.
So when he gets out,no one sees himself smaller.
(26:58):
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe it. Definitely.
The jacket thing is the reasonI don't believe he was ever forced in
and I'll get intosome of those theories later.
But there are people in thesea lot of like local rumors
that he was killed on purposeand forced in there.
And I think the jacket kind of debunksall those theories
(27:18):
because it was so neatly donethat he's not going to get forced in there
and he doesn't have roomto take off his jacket inside of it.
So it's like it
it's just a weird thing to take it offand neatly folded on top of you.
Yeah.
Oh, this is such a weird one, Amber.
It's such a have
I have you in such a weird episodebecause I don't even know where to go with
(27:41):
some of this stuff.
It's just like,I have to share this with somebody.
So the world listen to meas I get befuddled
and all these weird things.
Do you want to hear some of the othertheories?
Yes, please.
All right.
All right.
So these some of these are kind of funand talk about
Hollywood with, you know, the peeping Tom.
(28:03):
What's what? Cat.
I just already forgot the game I ruined.
That whole joke isI forgot the name of the Cinderella.
There we go. People are.
Really people.
People read the paper in them.
So the first could be.
Murder. From.
You mean Tanaka herself? Hmm.
So a lot.
(28:24):
Of people would jump to thisbecause they allegedly knew each other
and maybe had some sort of actuation with.
Or maybe there is a love triangle.
People have brought that upbecause she did have a boyfriend
and she they all knew each other.
So there could have been some kind of lovetriangle.
And the theory is that
she took
(28:44):
his shoe, threw it in the tank to be like,oh, your shoe fell in the tank.
And he went in to get his shoe.
And then she, like, kept him fromgetting back up and he eventually died.
I just.
Yeah, again, the jacket.
The jacket doesn't fit there.
Not only that, but if someoneif my shoe fell in to a septic tank
(29:09):
or whatever you want to call it,there's there's human waste in there.
I'm just going to get another shoe or gobarefoot.
I'm not going to be like,Oh, yeah, I better.
Go get it.
Right.
That and it doesn't explainwhy the other shoe.
And the shoe so far away.
Hundreds of meters away. Yes.
And even if you take that out,so maybe let's say
(29:31):
she didn't throw the shoe in or whatever,
a lot of people do think that sheshe may have killed him
or beat him up or somethingand then forced him into the pipe.
But again, there's nothere's no evidence that he was beat up.
There's no,you know, of anything like that.
And I think she would havehad to have help to get him in there.
So there's one other personand people don't keep secrets.
(29:53):
So if there's more than one persondoing a crime, I feel like eventually
somebody is going to say somethingand that hasn't happened.
And people even claim that likefinding him proves that she did it
because like she found him in a weird way,like she checked the pipe herself.
Like, if you see a shoe down there,why are you going to go look in the pipe?
Which that is a good question.
But like, that doesn't meanthere's not enough in there to connect it.
(30:16):
Like, show me more evidencebefore you're like, Yeah, you killed him
because she found a shoe in the toilet.
It's like there's just a big jump inand start there.
And the deal is to like wewe love to tell stories.
The human brain is a storyteller.
So we see things and think, oh,there might be a pattern there
(30:39):
or a connection,and we are going to run with it,
whether it is founded in truth or not.
So I think we're seeing a lot of that herealready.
Like you'rehitting one of my favorite topics,
just like a general kind oftheme is seeing how
our brains suddenly come up withnot just conspiracy.
(31:01):
It doesn't have to besome major conspiracy, but rumors
and ideas and theories.
And like the more questions there are,the more we kind of go as humans,
we all do it.
But like, they just it just goes haywire.
So like the.
Idea that, like, there's a lovetriangle here and that's why he died.
And it's like, what, where? Where?
You show me some evidence to that.
You're just jumping to that and on that.
(31:23):
Mark So the other big theorythat people have floating about
on the Internet, webwebs of surf waves of the Internet
is that he was silenced by politicians.
So here we go into the brain trying tocreate stories because this is so weird.
And who would climb into a pipe like that?
(31:45):
It's got to be the politicianstaking them out.
So thethe information floating around out there
is that there was a mayoral electiontaking place at the time in the village.
And so they're kind of Naoki supported
someone named Tadashi Ro, one Tanabe,who was kind of
like a village politician of some kind,and he was running
(32:08):
for the ultimate,ultimate local political role.
And rumor is that Tadashi Ro was buyingvotes.
And, you know, Yukiwithdrew his support because of that.
And so because the politicians found outthat he was withdrawing his support
and found out about what they were doing,they asked him.
So that's the rumor.
(32:29):
There's some other little storiesaround that,
like a coworker of Naoki had committedsuicide a month before.
And people assume that's also because,like, he didn't actually commit suicide.
He discovered something sinister going on.
And on the 24th,
which is the night I think he left home,there was a work dinner
(32:50):
and some sort of disagreement happened,leading some
to think that his employermay have even killed him.
These things are like mentionedwith no evidence whatsoever,
like all of these thingsor just like pure rumor speculation.
Again, creating stories like you said,
it is fascinatingwhere our minds go with these things.
(33:14):
Yeah, we need to tell stories so badlythat we will be like,
Well, this is obviously what happenedor what is happening because
I need to tell a story and the storymakes me feel good, even if it's not true.
Yeah.
And we have to tell stories
(33:35):
so muchthat we create our own podcasts. To.
There is as much as I'm,
I don't buy into these like rumorsand stuff or conspiracies again.
So I'm just goingwith very little information.
(33:55):
So I don't even want to allow myselfto go down that, that route of believing
political,you know, or politicians offing somebody
or paying people off or an employerkilling a worker.
But I do think it is interestingthat the police didn't reopen the case
or investigate
more when when there were localsand they actually signed a petition.
(34:15):
I think it was like thousands of peoplesigned a petition
for the policeto actually investigate this further
because they did write it offvery quickly.
They're like,Oh, some guy and some people.
That's it.
Going to find the paper, let's go home.
And so I do kind of think like maybe
maybe there is something to themjust kind of writing it off too quickly.
(34:36):
It is so bizarre that I feel like timeshould have been spent on it.
But again, I don't knowthese police officers, they did.
Maybe they're very smart and very good,so I don't want to assume too much there,
but it does just on the surface, it feelslike they wrote it off too quickly.
Yeah. Like somebody wasn'tasking all the questions.
They were just like,Oh, well, let's be people.
(34:58):
Then we have our story.
We're closing the case as opposed to,you know, say, a detective like Columbo
bride be like, well, you know,but why is this little thread
over here on the carpet or whatever.
Exactly Columbo should have been.
I would have loved an episode of Columboare just a pitch meeting.
(35:18):
I want a writer to be like, All right,here's what I'm going to do, guys.
Some guys found in a septic tankand Columbo's got.
To figure out why.
Yes, I don't think I don't think.
They would have gone for that,but it would have been fun.
It would have been fun.
So another theory is thatthere was some kind of version of suicide.
(35:39):
It's a it'snot the way I want to go. If I.
Do that, I'm.
Really.
Yeah, unless unless you happen to besomebody who is into,
you know, feces or drive find spacesand that's how you want to die.
I mean, that's kind of the questionbecause if I saw a pipe that small
(36:01):
and in that shape, I would have to knowthat I might get stuck
like there is a danger here.
It's freezing outside, I might get stuck.
And so yeah.
So if it is some sort of suicide thing,I guess if that's
what you like, it's like, hey,I'm going to go out on top kind of thing.
(36:22):
Like, is. That.
Kind of thinking in that situation?
I don't know.
Right.
Well,it reminds me of autoerotic asphyxiation.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I know people who will in some waychoke themselves
and then accidentally.
Yeah.
In order to get excited.
Yeah. Yeah.
(36:44):
I have to ask,is your husband in the same room with you?
Right now? No,
I was going to say, this has got.
To be the weirdest thingbecause he can't hear my end of this.
This has got to be the weirdest listening,right?
Yeah.
And and then the other theory,I actually already mentioned this earlier
(37:05):
just because I felt it was appropriateto bring up, but the sort of someone
could have been after onand he ran, lost a shoe, chased and head.
If I was runningfrom somebody for my life,
I would be willing to get into,you know, a tank full of feces, you know,
because I'd rather live and be coveredin shit than get killed, you know.
(37:26):
I true that.
So if he was, how. Did he get in. Yeah.
And also. Yeah.
And you can't get it I would imagineyou can't get in there fast like
it's going to take a bitto kind of squirm around and.
Yeah, and he took off at least his jacket,maybe even more clothes
depending on where you.
Really folded it.
(37:46):
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't.
And also there would have to bethere's an I do believe in coincidences,
but there'd be a big coincidencethat he also knew Yumi Tanaka.
It is a dorm, but it's like herprivate bedroom, her private toilet.
And that's the only toilet connectedto, to that tank.
(38:07):
So yeah, he might have, he might havejust wanted to catch a peek I.
Guess.
Had kind of super gross.
This is a gross episode.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, man, man, I feel badfor inviting you on this episode now.
But it's it's. Like.
(38:28):
I was.
I was even worried aheadtime, like, oh, god, what am I doing?
What am I doing with this one?
But it's just it's fascinated meever since I first read about it
and I was like, I just have toI have to cover it.
But it is it reminds me of the
oh, sorry, the
Netflix docu
series that was about the Cecil Hotel.
(38:50):
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that where the Internet went crazy?
Yeah.
That was a hugeI remember when that first came out,
I was reading about that forever.I was so excited.
They made a doctor's seriesabout that, everything else,
and I've listened to a lot of podcaston that.
Alyssa LAMB I think that's hername is Lisa LAMB or Alissa LAMB,
and that that's actually a nice comparisonbecause she
(39:12):
maybe we don't know,but she got in that water
tank on top of the hotel
which like, why are you doing that?
You know. Like, yeah, there's.
There's questions about behaviorthat I don't understand, right?
I was like, was there some other mentalillness going on?
And I don't know.
(39:33):
I mean, because I'm coming from the USor Western framework anyway.
Yeah.
Like what diagnoses look likeand I really have no idea what
mental health treatment or diagnosislooks like in other countries or cultures.
So I'd be so fascinated. Like.
Yeah, I mean I.
I don't even know what to ask you in this,but I feel like there's
(39:55):
something here of this maybe,and it totally inappropriate even.
QUESTION But like if youif you had a client of some kind.
Client Sorry, patient, patient.
Patient. Client.
Client patient a client patient.
But if you had a patient that
you found out and I'm not saying deceasedor anything, but like someone claimed
suddenly lived in a crawl space of a housefor two days or something like that
(40:20):
is. Yeah.
Is there some sort of mental
disorder or conditionthat would make people
just want to bein some sort of confined dark
space alone.
In the.
Cool clinical trial?
I just yeah,at least it doesn't make sense to me,
(40:43):
but that's where we get intowhat is going on in that person's psyche
that might make them want to dosomething like that or think they want to.
Because I'm going to places like psychosiswhere we hear
voicesor see things that other people can't see.
You're here.
I don't want to disregard the potentialof spirit, the spiritual realm. But
(41:10):
what was he hearing?
Voices or seeing things chasing him?
I didn't.
Maybe it didn't exist.I don't. Know. Yeah.
That's the biggest missing piece of this.
It's not evidentiarytype details are definitely missing
in the kind of researchthat I think we can get access to,
(41:31):
unless some local from the area can goand get police reports
and whatever and actually start releasingmore really specific details.
But I honestly feel like
I want to know more about him.
To me, my own personal theory isI do think he was there was some sort
of sexual satisfactionthat he was going for in this situation.
(41:54):
And no matter how bizarre or weirdthat may be to the rest of us.
So, yeah.What what else was going on in his life?
What was he like?
Was he was he dealing with anything elsepsychologically that we don't know
about being this far awayand not having access to all the details?
I would be more interested in thatthan like how how exactly far away was his
you you know, or were there dogsthat you'd choose in the neighborhood?
(42:18):
And if he. Knew, you mean.
Why did he go to the toiletlike two days before she was home?
Because she was out of town.
Like if he knew her, did he didhe not know she was out of town?
There's weird questions like thatthat people bring up that I'm like,
I honestly would justI just care more about him.
First, I want to learn.
Yes, those are important details,but I want to know more about him
(42:39):
because I feel like that's wherea lot of the answers may lie in this.
And unfortunately,we just. Don't have those.
Answerseven in him in relation to the community.
Like like you said,there's this idea that he was friendly
with you and perhaps her boyfriend.
And so what was. Yeah, just
(43:00):
there's, there's so much missing.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we'll have more.
And honestly that's where listeners, when,where you come in is if you have a way
to research this more, reach out to peopleor you've found
actual thingsmore than just some like five
or six Chinese articlesI found with really bad translations.
(43:21):
And more than just people,people posting, I'd read it.
If you have more information,please send me an email.
A study of stranger at gmail.com,because I would love to do a follow up.
This is it's just so fascinating.
It's captivated everybody's imaginationsbecause of how bizarre and gross.
Like, there's this combinationof just like, interesting things to this.
(43:41):
There's a there's a sexual aspectto it, potentially.
There's a psychological aspect.
There's a gross factor to it.
So, yeah, if anybody knowsanything out there more to this case,
please email and we will do a follow up,maybe even have you on the show.
Whoever found it, we can do a follow upthere be so much fun.
But yeah, that is it.
Amber, this is a shorter storythan one of my deep dove.
(44:01):
True crime.
I wanted to do like a palate cleanserafter doing ghost stories all October.
I love it.
And I thought this. One would be kind of.
A palate cleanser. Good, good.
Yeah, yeah.
And I. Don't knowif I really. Thought that through
that it's a bad figure of speech.
When I was when I was writing my note.
(44:22):
So I was like, this case,I wish I had more information
or like new lightor new theories to present. And I don't.
But I just found itso fascinating that I wanted
I literally wrote down Dove inand I was like, I can't write that it.
I can't write that in my notes.
That is that is just awful.
Head first. Head first.
Yeah, this was a weird one.
(44:43):
And again, I wanted to do my age.
I have these like short recreation sceneswhich are so much fun
to do in these stories.
And just everything seemed inappropriatebecause there's I think
if we knew more if we knew more details,I think we could do some of those.
But but otherwise,I feel like you're doing justice
to the like the people involved.
Yeah. Yeah.
(45:03):
Look, I love finding interesting storiesonline and weeding through.
To find the consistencies is what I didwhen I researched this,
and it made it even more interesting.
It didn't make it less interestingto go down that rabbit hole.
It made it more interesting and raised.
It's like the rabbit hole never ends.
Yeah, and no, it never, never does.
But I love it.But thank you, Amber, so much.
(45:25):
I will have to have you onfor another episode in the future
that that doesn't involvehuman waste and strange.
But you. Know I think.
If we're going to go after
dogs of the super strangeend of season behavior, this is it.
Is it. And look.
If you end up thinking about it moreand have some sort of bizarre theory or
something, you know, we'll do a follow up,a quick little anecdote or something.
(45:49):
So sounds like it might be likechewing on this for a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you want to share anythingabout where people might find you,
or do you want peopleto follow you on anything?
Yeah, well, I mean, we've all been through
a tough couple of yearsnow with the whole COVID thing,
so I'm helping a lot of folks manageour collective invitee around
(46:13):
all of those types of thingsand and the stresses in our lives.
You can follow me on Instagram.
I am at amber dot says dot shine
and my website is pacific
mft dot com slash amber dash keating
(46:33):
which let's imaginewe could put right down somewhere.
Yeah.
Now I'll put those in the show notesfor everybody and please pick it up.
You do great work.
And Amber,I didn't say that at top of the show,
but Amber is a good friend of mineand my families.
And so is your your husband, John, whoI will have to on for a murder mystery.
I got to find a good one for him to be on,but I really appreciate it.
(46:56):
And again, I went into today
having some anxiety myself about likethis one is just kind of gross.
I hope Amber isn't upset with this,but it is an interesting story.
So I really do appreciate youtaking the time out of your day to do this
and bringing some some light to it
and bringing up really good questionsthat I think tie into other things
that I'm interested inin the world of mystery.
Yeah. Yeah.
(47:16):
Thank you so much for having me on.
This was it was a lot of fun.
I mean, a great topic, honestly,because I am
endlessly fascinated by the really
out of the ordinary lens.
Out of the ordinary.
That's a good that'smaybe a good title for this one.
Thank you so much.
(47:37):
And that's our show.
Thank you so much for listening.
This is a study of strangeand that was definitely a strange case.
I wish thatI had more information on that.
And like I said in the show,if you do have information on that case
of the Fukushima man, pleaseemail study of strange at gmail.com.
I want to give a big shout outand thank you to everybody
that participated in my Halloweenspecials, Terrifying Tales
(48:01):
and also Tom Holland for his interviewaround Halloween
next week, thoughI'm very excited to announce that
we're going to be covering a UFO case,
and I feel like this is me
dip in my toes into some UFO storiesbecause I don't know them as well as I do.
Other strange mysteries.
So tune in next week for a UFO case.
(48:23):
Make sure to subscribe, rateand review the show.
Check us out on Patriot
and you can find all of the show notesand information at WW.
WW A Study of Strange Tor.com Thank you
and goodnight.
February 28th, 1989.
Media Koji Fukushima, Japan.
A school teacher returned to her dormto settle in for the night
in her private bathroom.
Something cut her off a man's shoe downin the pipe of the old fashioned toilet.
Upon investigate,the teacher made a horrid discovery.
(00:23):
A dead body of a manwas stuck in the small septic tank.
A truly strange case unfolded,and every time investigators collected
a new piece of evidence, it only raisedmore questions than answers.
And as you can imagine, rumorsbegan to swirl.
The case has only recently gotten
(00:43):
international attentionthanks to the viral nature of the story.
But what really happened
and will we ever know?
This is a study of strange.
(01:13):
Good evening.
Thank you for listening.
I wanted to make one quick announcement.
Tonight I am going to keep housekeepingto a minimum and save that for the end.
The announcement is I have beenresearching a couple of UFO episodes.
One will be next week. Another one?
I don't know when it will be.
Maybe a month or so from now,but it made me realize
it might be fun to do similar episodesof what I did with Terrifying Tales
(01:34):
or Halloween specials of peoplesharing personal stories.
So if you have an account,if you've witnessed something strange
and unidentified in the sky,I would love to have you on the show.
Pleaseemail me a study of strange at gmail.com.
Send me your storiesor some information about an experience
you had involving a UFOor unidentified aerial phenomena.
(01:58):
I would love to have you on the show.
I'm not surewhen that episode will be made.
It may be months from now,
but I would love to start collecting thosenow and I am looking forward to it.
So thank you.
And now enjoy a very normal story ofa dead body being found in a septic tank.
Super normal.
Not. Not strange at all. Enjoy.
(02:19):
Welcome to the show.
I'm Michael May.
And with me today,my guest is Amber Keating.
Who is Amber, I should probablyhave you describe what you do because I'll
probably misinterpret her or representactually who and what you are.
So why don't you tell everybodywhat you do for a living?
Yes. Hello.
I am a licensed clinical social worker
(02:41):
and that means I am a mental healthclinician.
So I do therapy for a living.
It's a great trick to use at a partyto make people go away.
Oh, yes
and yes.
So I've been doing it for for a long time.
I'm in private practice
now, and I mainly work with peoplewho have, like anxiety and trauma.
(03:04):
Super fun stuff.
Yeah, well, yes, well, well,thank you for doing what you do,
because that is an important thing.
And I wanted to have you on this episodebecause as the as the audience
is just heard in the intro,this one's a bit of a doozy.
And it involves a little bit of a triggerwarning here.
It involves a dead body, which is kind ofcommon for the crime elements in my show.
(03:26):
So that's not unusual, sadly.
But this does involve some gross thingsbecause it does involve human waste.
But there also we will get into theorieslater on, but it might involve some kind
of like fetishes or voyeurismor a lot of different things like that.
And I honestly wanted somebody
that understands the human behaviorand psyche better than I do on the show.
(03:48):
So thank you so much for for coming onin this very weird, bizarre story.
I'm a big fan of human behavior, so it's.
And I will
make a couple of points herebefore I dove into the story.
So this test took place in Japan,
and I did ask a friend of minewho taught in Japan
for a few years to help just make sureI pronounce things correctly.
(04:12):
And he actually pointed outthat there are different ways
to pronounce the names and places in this,depending on where you're from.
So he wasn't that much help.
I was hoping for like one singular help.
So I've tried my best.
So if I do pronouncesomething incorrectly, I do apologize.
I am trying my best, but I mispronouncethings even from where I'm from.
So it's going to happen.
(04:32):
And the other thingis, most of the crime stories
I do on my show, I like to really gooverboard with research.
I like to find a lot of books and articlesand and hopefully it's a topic
that a lot of journalists that are betterat being journalists than me have
actually done researchthat I can sort of latch onto.
This story is a bitmore of like an Internet sensation.
(04:54):
It's one of these thingsthat's passed around on Reddit.
There's a ton of YouTube videos about it,but there's not actually a
lot of research in terms of like articlesor books or things like that.
So I've had to kind of pick and choosewhat sources
I feel seemed to be more realisticto kind of weed out some bad things.
(05:16):
And I've also I did find some articles,but they're all from China or Vietnam.
I did not find any articlesfrom the United States.
So there's a bit of like a translike a Google translate
or a version of that that kind of helped.
So if anybody out therelistening has more information or hears
me say things that,you know to be incorrect and you have
(05:36):
some sort of valid resource for that,reach out to me at a study of stranger
at Gmail dot com. I would love to hearthat and do a follow up.
Also some of the articlesI just find this fascinating.
This isn't actually that important,
but a lot of the articles,they get the names different.
And even when you like readabout this on Reddit or YouTube
or all these other sitesthat have interesting mysteries,
(05:56):
the names are always different
and that kind of puts up a red flagfor me of like, Wait, is this even true?
Am I going to find out thatthis is some hoax online?
It wouldn't really surprised me,but at the same time,
there's enough out there that I'm like,No, no, no, this is true.
I think people are just not gettingthe best resources
to corroborate the spelling of a nameor something like that.
(06:17):
And also the Chinese articles,
I think they have a Chinese versionof the Japanese name.
So it's, it's like close enough,but it's in Chinese. So.
Yeah, just interestinglittle little details. Yeah.
And also one more thing,Amber and I apologize.
Normally, I do recreations.
I don't know if you listen to theany of the episodes or not.
(06:37):
You don't have toyou don't don't feel obligated to.
But I normally do some recreationswhich are a lot of fun,
and I tried to write them for this episodeand they all seem
to be a little inappropriatebecause of the like content.
So I am not doing recreationsbecause it all seems like I was making
fun of potential victims and I was like,I don't want to do that.
(06:58):
It wasn't my intention,but it just kind of comes off that way.
So we will not be doing recreationstonight.
Everybody, I apologize.
So yeah, let's get into it again.
Me getting into the crazy story here.
So this happened on Sundayevening on February 28th, 1989,
and the story takes place in MiccosukeeVillage in the Fukushima prefecture,
(07:20):
which everybody knows because of thethe nuclear fallout in Fukushima, Japan.
The village mergedwith other villages in the area
in 2005 to form a city called Tamura.
And this area was evacuatedwhen the power plant lockdown happened.
Obviously,our story takes place before that. But
yeah, that
that is the locationof where this takes place.
(07:42):
So there is a elementary schoolin the village called a W Village
Elementary School and a teacher namedMummy Tanaka, who is 23 years old.
She came back to her dorm.
The teacher living quarters around 5 p.m.
on this Sundayand she had taken four days off.
She had a little herself, a little vacay.
(08:02):
So she came back on Sunday
and when she got homeshe went to use the toilet like we do.
And the toilet was in ruralJapan at the time.
And it may even still be like that today.I don't know.
They were using squat toilets
and for listeners in the United States,we're not as used to this,
but it's essentiallya little hole in the ground.
You squat over to relieve yourself.
(08:25):
And we're going to talk aboutplumbing a little bit.
I apologize, Amberand everybody listening,
but it is really important for the story.
So the squat toilet goes down,there's a pipe underneath it
that's about 18 inches longthat goes out into a little kind of like
when you read about this online,they keep telling us septic
tank, it's not a septic tank.
It's just like a collection tankand it's U-shaped.
(08:45):
So it kind of goesunderground a little bit.
And then on the outside of the dorm roomwall outside, there's
another pipe that comes upand it can open up.
And they come out and they clean itevery so often by attaching
some sort of hugeutility device of some kind to it.
So she she went to use the toiletand when she was getting ready to use it,
she saw in the pipe was a man's shoeand she lives alone.
(09:10):
It's her private bathroom.
No one else uses the bathroom.
The shoe,I don't think probably could even fit down
into the pipe from the toilet itself.
I'm just assuming on that.
But she was very weirded out bythis as one would be.
So she goes outside
and checksto the other end of the pipe and it's open
(09:32):
and she looks insideand she sees human feet.
So she immediately panics.
She gets guys from the guys dorm,she gets friends from the girls dorm.
She gets all these peopleto come out and check this.
And, you know, just this is just weird.
So who knows how I would behavein this situation.
And everybody sees the personthey're kind of grossed out.
(09:53):
There's no response.
And they eventually call the police,the authorities
now the toilet.
I got to give some
some sighs to this because, again,this is important for the story.
But again, it's a U-shaped.
There are visuals in my show notes.
There are visualsthat have been shared across online.
So check out my show notesto actually see some links for this.
(10:14):
The pipes, the pipe from outside
that goes vertically down is 42 inchestall.
And it's 14 inches wide.
I don't know that in the metric system,
but I should have looked upcentimeters as well.
And inside the sort of bottom partthat goes
horizontally is 49 inches longand then it's 18 inches.
I went to the toilet. It's small.
(10:35):
The point of this is it's small.Check out the visual references.
Everybody just because it it helps.
It's not easy for a personto get in there.
And that's what the first strange bitabout this case is.
How could a person get in to a pipethat is that small?
Because you can't extend yourself.
You can't turn aroundonce you're in there.
Also being the U-shape, it's like,how do you get from the vertical part
(10:57):
into the horizontal? Like it's. Just.
Very, very bizarre and small and cramped.
And when the authorities showed up,
they immediatelycould tell that the man inside was dead.
And so they tried to grab on to him.
I'm assuming, by the legs,because that's the part by the opening,
they can't get him out and they try
and they're trying to tryand they can't get him out.
They call the fire department.
(11:18):
Fire department shows up.
They can't get him out.
Eventually they have to get an excavatorto dig up the pipe.
They lift it up with a crane.
They try to get him out again.
They can't get him out still.
So they had to cut the pipeopen to get this man out.
Was it? Yeah. Yeah. And
so the body was found.
(11:40):
Once they cracked it open, they saw him.
He was in a fetal position on his back.
So he is I wish everybody could see me.
It's kind of hard to. Like.
Do this, but yeah, Amberstrying to act it out as well.
So he's on his back.
And his feet because of how short it is.
49 inches his legs are basically like upin the fetal position area
(12:00):
so that so yeah. There you go. Thereyou go.
I was getting in itand on his chest is his jacket.
So he's folded his jacket
like very nicely and put it on his chest.
It was about I think it was negativetwo degrees Celsius when they found him
or that was the average temperature.I forget what the exact thing was.
(12:21):
But it's pointis, it's very cold in this area of Japan.
This time of year. It is winter.
And he didn't have shoes on because therewas that one shoe in the tank,
the other shoe which we willget into a little bit more in a moment.
But the other shoe is nowhere to be found.
It's not outside the pipe.
It's not outside on the ground.
It's not on his body. It's nowhere.
(12:42):
Now, there are conflicting reports,depending on what you read.
Some say that the guy was naked withthe jacket on, is on his chest.
Most of the articles, though,say his pants were on.
He just was sort of shirtlessand jacket on his chest.
So I don't know what it is,but but there you go.
Now some details immediatelycome into question,
(13:04):
as I'm sure you probably have questions,too, Amber.
So many. So many.
So the average Japanese
man at the time is had a width of shoulderwidth of 16 inches
the pipe to getin, had a diameter of 14 inches.
So it's not impossible.
I can I can even kind of make myselfsmaller right now and squeeze
(13:26):
into something, but it's not, again,not easy and you got to go straight down.
And they kind of do a quick 90 degreeturn to get into this pipe.
So how did somebody fit in?
There is the first question.
The other
question is, if he's shoeless,why is there one in the tank
and the one in the tank is up by his headbecause it was underneath the toilet part
(13:47):
and he would have hadto put that shoe in first.
So that's just a bizarre thing ofwhy put your shoe in there
and the other one is missing.
So the forensics team had to cleanthe man twice.
I can only imagine.
And they concluded that the cause of death
was suffocationbrought on by cold and cramp ness.
(14:10):
Now, most of these things,if you're on Reddit
or all these other sitesthat share stories
like this, most of the time it's reportedas he freeze to death
and then people come upwith little conspiracies and theories
that like, well,if he was in a tank like this,
he would die from suffocation firstbecause of all the methane
and all this kind of stuff.
He would he would die from breathingbefore he would freeze to death.
(14:33):
But he actually did die by suffocationfirst.
And people kind of have that incorrect.
And I got thatfrom one of the newspaper articles.
So he died of suffocationbrought on by cold and dampness.
Again, not the best sources, though,so I'm happy to be wrong on that.
But so that's kind ofmy deduction in this.
There are no signs of trauma,meaning like he had a couple of bruises
(14:54):
on like an elbow or something,but he wasn't all cut up
and his face wasn't beat up and scrapesand everything else.
So you can imagine from tryingto fit into a small, cramped pipe,
but because he didn't have the trauma,
it's kind of quickly assumedthat he got in there himself.
They also believe that he was deadfor about two days. Or.
(15:15):
So, depending on the source, eitherthe authorities
or Yumi Tanaka identified the deceased man
if she identified him firstor if authorities identified him first.
I don't know if it really matters,but the point is, is
they were able to identify him and Yumi,the girl knew him
and his name was Kono Naoki.
(15:38):
And he was 26 years old
and he was a reputable young man.
He was a sales manager at the NuclearPower Plant Maintenance Company.
He was a member of local clubsand around town.
And people generally really liked himand thought highly of him.
And he was depending again on sources.
(15:59):
I have to say that a lot todayhe was either friends with Yumi
or Friendly, like some sort of
an associate of humans of some kind,an acquaintance.
That's a better, better word there.
Word on the street is that he helped herwhen another man
had been harassing her,like via phone calls and stuff like that.
(16:21):
Apparently, Kono Naoki had supported herand helped her and her boyfriend
kind of deal with whateverthe harassment is.
I don't have a lot of details on that,but that does come up in a
lot of the research over and over againthat he was of help to her.
So yeah, I can't confirm how closethey were, but they did know each other.
Now, when Kono Naoki was found,
(16:43):
it pointed to him
having gotten into the septic
tank on purpose, which is already kind ofwhat I'm leaning towards.
But just to say it vocally out loud,he was not forced.
They found his carnearby, unlocked keys left in the car.
Kono had
told his fatherthat he was running errands on the 24th.
(17:06):
So that's four days prior to being found.
And he wasn't reported missing
because his family was quick to point outhe's 26, he's an adult.
Like he goes outsometimes and goes places.
So we're not going to report.
A missing is 26 years old.
And all of this calculating,all of this kind of everything adds up
(17:26):
to kind of a simple conclusionthat the police came to, which is he
got in the tank by himself on purposeto peep potentially.
It was that he was a peeper.
He wanted to spy on a womanusing the toilet.
And he got in there and got stuckand that's why he died.
However, there are some in the town,including his parents,
(17:50):
that petitioned the policeto reopen the case and investigate it
more because of a lot of the bizarrethings involved.
And the policerefused to investigate any further.
So the case was kind of closed that
he just died because he got stucktrying to peep on somebody.
Oh, so Amber, there's the basis of it.
There's there is some more to this,but there's the the general. How.
(18:13):
Set up for this story.
So do you have any questions, anythingyou want to bring up right now before.
We go northwest?
I don't think so.
I'm just I'm so fascinated.
Like I really
want to know what happened to this guy.
You've asked him like, dude,what are you doing?
Yeah, what are you doing?
Yeah. Yeah.
(18:34):
So here's where it gets weird.
And if it's not weird already
weird. Yeah. Here's.
Here's where it gets weirder.
See, that's a better translation.That's good.
His other shoe was found
a couple hundred meters away by a stream.
Oh, yeah.
(18:54):
It's not right there. It's not by the car.
It's not on the other side of the pipe.
It's hundreds of meters away.
Very strange.
And again, I already said this earlier,but like the one shoe in the tank
would have had to go in first. Hmm.
So the shoes are a bigkind of piece of evidence
to this case to just make it very odd and.
(19:16):
And doesn't make itso succinct to just be like,
oh, this guy just climbed in therebecause he wanted to peep and died.
Now you got.
It. I wasn't going to bring this up yet,but I kind of think
I will just talk about the shoes.
So there are some theories that suggest
that hemight have been chased by somebody.
(19:37):
And the shoe is a big part of that,because what if you're running,
you're trying to get away from somebody,
your shoe falls off,but you just keep going.
And then the tank could have beenjust the first hiding place
he saw is like, oh, they're not goingto look into a waste receptacle.
They're not going to do that.
So I'm just going to jump in there.
Doesn't explain everything.
(19:59):
Yeah, yeah.
But it definitely. Does.
Like it's one of the only theoriesthat actually kind of explains the shoe
being found so far away. Right.
And do you think Tom, Cinderella was.
Yeah, Peeping Tom. Cinderella two.
That's a movie.
That's a movie right there.
The Peeping Tom.
Cinderella does well in Hollywood.
(20:21):
We get a picture that is going to be goingto be submitted to it.
There's a Netflix specialin there somewhere.
So the size of the tank in the pipes,I listed them before
and everybody can kind of goin my shownotes to see them.
But his shoulders were two incheswider than the diameter,
so we would add a squeeze in there.
His family wanted to sort ofput this to the test because she does he
(20:44):
they don't believe that he is a peepingtom and would have crawled
into something full of human wastejust to peep on somebody.
So they actually bought the same pipe
to test it outand they had somebody about the size
of Kono Naoki try to climb inand he couldn't do it.
They could not replicatesomebody getting into the pipe.
(21:06):
Wow. So that brings up the question,
did he climb in there himself. Or.
Was he forced.
Wow. Dun dun dun dun. Uh.
Hey, all, I wanted
to take a quick secondto tell you about Audible.
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(21:28):
But there's good reason for that.
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(21:51):
Right now, I'm listeningto The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth
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(22:15):
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that's audibletrail dot com slash strange Thank you.
There are no shortage of theoriesfloating around.
(22:36):
One of my favorite things in this,because this is all like online research.
There's no books or anything.
Again, reading comments, is it?
I always I basically try to refrainfrom ever
reading comments of anything onlinebecause it's terrible.
But I was trying just to find moreinformation and like, does
anybody else have a linkto somewhere else?
And occasionally you would come acrosssomething that did help in my research.
(22:58):
But there are a lot of comments of peoplethat have theories
that I feel likethey'll read the first paragraph
and not the rest of the story
because they'll be like,Oh, this is definitely what happened.
And it's like,Oh, if you just kept reading,
you would find thatthat's that's not the case.
But there isthere are some, some interesting theories
that people put put forward.And I'll just go on to those now.
(23:18):
Or do you want to jump into a theory?
Amber I feel like I've just talkedto the whole time.
I'm just like, I'm flabbergasted. Yeah.
What? That's
what I'm going to do.
I'm going to change my mind here. I'mgoing to do this a little bit different.
Then I'm going to go oversome of the other theories a bit later.
What I want to talk about with youspecifically is
some people online have suggested
(23:40):
there are interestingfetishes in the world
and there is a stereotype with Japanwhere there are
sort of like weird or uniquefetishes in Japan.
And I do not judge anybody for that.
But there areI actually looked up terms for this.
So there's voyeurism, which is part of it.
I think everybody knows about voyeurism,
but there's also an I don't knowif I'm going to say this right.
(24:00):
Coprophilia.
That sounds right coprophilia Okay.
And that's excitement and interestin feces is the way I read it.
Is that did youdo you ever do you have to study.
Things like that when you. Were.
I doing ADR? Oh, really.
I know it.
I've never worked with anyone.Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not my specialty, but. Yes, yes.
(24:23):
I actually wish that would be amazing,especially for this podcast
to be like, Oh my, my friendis a specialist in coprophilia
and there's also cluster philia,which I probably said that wrong too.
But I think everybody can kind of deducewhat that is.
It's a it's an interestor sexual interest in confinement.
So there are various fetishes.
They kind of may lead somebody to want
(24:47):
to actually put themselves in a
potentially life threatening,dangerous and gross situation.
I wouldn't do that
myself. Right.
But really to each their own, I suppose.
Each their own. Yeah, I guess so.
And when I was looking into thisand I may have
(25:08):
this may have been a comment I wish I hadwrote down where I saw this list.
Either it could have been my idea,but I may not have been smart enough
to come up with this.
I wrote this down, though,is that the shoe could have been
put in first as a way,just like block his face when she's
using the toilet or even hide it,because I think it was a black shoe.
So it like helps hide himin the shadows of the pipes, potentially.
(25:33):
Well, that interesting onebecause I was trying to think like, why?
Why on earth wouldn'tthe shoe go in first?
What? Yeah, yeah. That
does not compute.
But that
seems feasible.
If feasible, I don'tI still don't know if that's right or not,
but it's something it'ssome kind of guess.
(25:54):
And why the shoe was in there,
the jacket, he folded up the jacketand sort of tucked it.
If you can see me kind of liketucked up like this across the him.
And I mean, do you have any ideas on that?
Because I'm all out of ideas.
No. I mean, I'll just saywe watched the mummy
the other day and saw the original. Yeah.
(26:16):
And that, that, that is just the imagethat it's conjuring up
is the person going into the sarcophagus.
Yes. And the Boris Karloff oneis that when you're talking about.
Yes, I see Boris Karloff.
Yeah, I think it's Boris. Carrie probably
I'm terrible with.
Yeah name.
(26:37):
Is. Some people have brought up thatlike he did that to keep warm but I'm like
but he's not wearing ring it
I mean yeah you get ita little bit of warmth from that.
Could it be to keep it cleanwhich may lead in
to like the hiding theoryof like hiding from somebody
if he just like took it offto try to keep it
clean and go in thereor he was just trying to keep it clean.
So when he gets out,no one sees himself smaller.
(26:58):
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe it. Definitely.
The jacket thing is the reasonI don't believe he was ever forced in
and I'll get intosome of those theories later.
But there are people in thesea lot of like local rumors
that he was killed on purposeand forced in there.
And I think the jacket kind of debunksall those theories
(27:18):
because it was so neatly donethat he's not going to get forced in there
and he doesn't have roomto take off his jacket inside of it.
So it's like it
it's just a weird thing to take it offand neatly folded on top of you.
Yeah.
Oh, this is such a weird one, Amber.
It's such a have
I have you in such a weird episodebecause I don't even know where to go with
(27:41):
some of this stuff.
It's just like,I have to share this with somebody.
So the world listen to meas I get befuddled
and all these weird things.
Do you want to hear some of the othertheories?
Yes, please.
All right.
All right.
So these some of these are kind of funand talk about
Hollywood with, you know, the peeping Tom.
(28:03):
What's what? Cat.
I just already forgot the game I ruined.
That whole joke isI forgot the name of the Cinderella.
There we go. People are.
Really people.
People read the paper in them.
So the first could be.
Murder. From.
You mean Tanaka herself? Hmm.
So a lot.
(28:24):
Of people would jump to thisbecause they allegedly knew each other
and maybe had some sort of actuation with.
Or maybe there is a love triangle.
People have brought that upbecause she did have a boyfriend
and she they all knew each other.
So there could have been some kind of lovetriangle.
And the theory is that
she took
(28:44):
his shoe, threw it in the tank to be like,oh, your shoe fell in the tank.
And he went in to get his shoe.
And then she, like, kept him fromgetting back up and he eventually died.
I just.
Yeah, again, the jacket.
The jacket doesn't fit there.
Not only that, but if someoneif my shoe fell in to a septic tank
(29:09):
or whatever you want to call it,there's there's human waste in there.
I'm just going to get another shoe or gobarefoot.
I'm not going to be like,Oh, yeah, I better.
Go get it.
Right.
That and it doesn't explainwhy the other shoe.
And the shoe so far away.
Hundreds of meters away. Yes.
And even if you take that out,so maybe let's say
(29:31):
she didn't throw the shoe in or whatever,
a lot of people do think that sheshe may have killed him
or beat him up or somethingand then forced him into the pipe.
But again, there's nothere's no evidence that he was beat up.
There's no,you know, of anything like that.
And I think she would havehad to have help to get him in there.
So there's one other personand people don't keep secrets.
(29:53):
So if there's more than one persondoing a crime, I feel like eventually
somebody is going to say somethingand that hasn't happened.
And people even claim that likefinding him proves that she did it
because like she found him in a weird way,like she checked the pipe herself.
Like, if you see a shoe down there,why are you going to go look in the pipe?
Which that is a good question.
But like, that doesn't meanthere's not enough in there to connect it.
(30:16):
Like, show me more evidencebefore you're like, Yeah, you killed him
because she found a shoe in the toilet.
It's like there's just a big jump inand start there.
And the deal is to like wewe love to tell stories.
The human brain is a storyteller.
So we see things and think, oh,there might be a pattern there
(30:39):
or a connection,and we are going to run with it,
whether it is founded in truth or not.
So I think we're seeing a lot of that herealready.
Like you'rehitting one of my favorite topics,
just like a general kind oftheme is seeing how
our brains suddenly come up withnot just conspiracy.
(31:01):
It doesn't have to besome major conspiracy, but rumors
and ideas and theories.
And like the more questions there are,the more we kind of go as humans,
we all do it.
But like, they just it just goes haywire.
So like the.
Idea that, like, there's a lovetriangle here and that's why he died.
And it's like, what, where? Where?
You show me some evidence to that.
You're just jumping to that and on that.
(31:23):
Mark So the other big theorythat people have floating about
on the Internet, webwebs of surf waves of the Internet
is that he was silenced by politicians.
So here we go into the brain trying tocreate stories because this is so weird.
And who would climb into a pipe like that?
(31:45):
It's got to be the politicianstaking them out.
So thethe information floating around out there
is that there was a mayoral electiontaking place at the time in the village.
And so they're kind of Naoki supported
someone named Tadashi Ro, one Tanabe,who was kind of
like a village politician of some kind,and he was running
(32:08):
for the ultimate,ultimate local political role.
And rumor is that Tadashi Ro was buyingvotes.
And, you know, Yukiwithdrew his support because of that.
And so because the politicians found outthat he was withdrawing his support
and found out about what they were doing,they asked him.
So that's the rumor.
(32:29):
There's some other little storiesaround that,
like a coworker of Naoki had committedsuicide a month before.
And people assume that's also because,like, he didn't actually commit suicide.
He discovered something sinister going on.
And on the 24th,
which is the night I think he left home,there was a work dinner
(32:50):
and some sort of disagreement happened,leading some
to think that his employermay have even killed him.
These things are like mentionedwith no evidence whatsoever,
like all of these thingsor just like pure rumor speculation.
Again, creating stories like you said,
it is fascinatingwhere our minds go with these things.
(33:14):
Yeah, we need to tell stories so badlythat we will be like,
Well, this is obviously what happenedor what is happening because
I need to tell a story and the storymakes me feel good, even if it's not true.
Yeah.
And we have to tell stories
(33:35):
so muchthat we create our own podcasts. To.
There is as much as I'm,
I don't buy into these like rumorsand stuff or conspiracies again.
So I'm just goingwith very little information.
(33:55):
So I don't even want to allow myselfto go down that, that route of believing
political,you know, or politicians offing somebody
or paying people off or an employerkilling a worker.
But I do think it is interestingthat the police didn't reopen the case
or investigate
more when when there were localsand they actually signed a petition.
(34:15):
I think it was like thousands of peoplesigned a petition
for the policeto actually investigate this further
because they did write it offvery quickly.
They're like,Oh, some guy and some people.
That's it.
Going to find the paper, let's go home.
And so I do kind of think like maybe
maybe there is something to themjust kind of writing it off too quickly.
(34:36):
It is so bizarre that I feel like timeshould have been spent on it.
But again, I don't knowthese police officers, they did.
Maybe they're very smart and very good,so I don't want to assume too much there,
but it does just on the surface, it feelslike they wrote it off too quickly.
Yeah. Like somebody wasn'tasking all the questions.
They were just like,Oh, well, let's be people.
(34:58):
Then we have our story.
We're closing the case as opposed to,you know, say, a detective like Columbo
bride be like, well, you know,but why is this little thread
over here on the carpet or whatever.
Exactly Columbo should have been.
I would have loved an episode of Columboare just a pitch meeting.
(35:18):
I want a writer to be like, All right,here's what I'm going to do, guys.
Some guys found in a septic tankand Columbo's got.
To figure out why.
Yes, I don't think I don't think.
They would have gone for that,but it would have been fun.
It would have been fun.
So another theory is thatthere was some kind of version of suicide.
(35:39):
It's a it'snot the way I want to go. If I.
Do that, I'm.
Really.
Yeah, unless unless you happen to besomebody who is into,
you know, feces or drive find spacesand that's how you want to die.
I mean, that's kind of the questionbecause if I saw a pipe that small
(36:01):
and in that shape, I would have to knowthat I might get stuck
like there is a danger here.
It's freezing outside, I might get stuck.
And so yeah.
So if it is some sort of suicide thing,I guess if that's
what you like, it's like, hey,I'm going to go out on top kind of thing.
(36:22):
Like, is. That.
Kind of thinking in that situation?
I don't know.
Right.
Well,it reminds me of autoerotic asphyxiation.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I know people who will in some waychoke themselves
and then accidentally.
Yeah.
In order to get excited.
Yeah. Yeah.
(36:44):
I have to ask,is your husband in the same room with you?
Right now? No,
I was going to say, this has got.
To be the weirdest thingbecause he can't hear my end of this.
This has got to be the weirdest listening,right?
Yeah.
And and then the other theory,I actually already mentioned this earlier
(37:05):
just because I felt it was appropriateto bring up, but the sort of someone
could have been after onand he ran, lost a shoe, chased and head.
If I was runningfrom somebody for my life,
I would be willing to get into,you know, a tank full of feces, you know,
because I'd rather live and be coveredin shit than get killed, you know.
(37:26):
I true that.
So if he was, how. Did he get in. Yeah.
And also. Yeah.
And you can't get it I would imagineyou can't get in there fast like
it's going to take a bitto kind of squirm around and.
Yeah, and he took off at least his jacket,maybe even more clothes
depending on where you.
Really folded it.
(37:46):
Yeah, yeah. It doesn't.
And also there would have to bethere's an I do believe in coincidences,
but there'd be a big coincidencethat he also knew Yumi Tanaka.
It is a dorm, but it's like herprivate bedroom, her private toilet.
And that's the only toilet connectedto, to that tank.
(38:07):
So yeah, he might have, he might havejust wanted to catch a peek I.
Guess.
Had kind of super gross.
This is a gross episode.
I don't know what I'm doing.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, man, man, I feel badfor inviting you on this episode now.
But it's it's. Like.
(38:28):
I was.
I was even worried aheadtime, like, oh, god, what am I doing?
What am I doing with this one?
But it's just it's fascinated meever since I first read about it
and I was like, I just have toI have to cover it.
But it is it reminds me of the
oh, sorry, the
Netflix docu
series that was about the Cecil Hotel.
(38:50):
Yeah. Yeah.
Is that where the Internet went crazy?
Yeah.
That was a hugeI remember when that first came out,
I was reading about that forever.I was so excited.
They made a doctor's seriesabout that, everything else,
and I've listened to a lot of podcaston that.
Alyssa LAMB I think that's hername is Lisa LAMB or Alissa LAMB,
and that that's actually a nice comparisonbecause she
(39:12):
maybe we don't know,but she got in that water
tank on top of the hotel
which like, why are you doing that?
You know. Like, yeah, there's.
There's questions about behaviorthat I don't understand, right?
I was like, was there some other mentalillness going on?
And I don't know.
(39:33):
I mean, because I'm coming from the USor Western framework anyway.
Yeah.
Like what diagnoses look likeand I really have no idea what
mental health treatment or diagnosislooks like in other countries or cultures.
So I'd be so fascinated. Like.
Yeah, I mean I.
I don't even know what to ask you in this,but I feel like there's
(39:55):
something here of this maybe,and it totally inappropriate even.
QUESTION But like if youif you had a client of some kind.
Client Sorry, patient, patient.
Patient. Client.
Client patient a client patient.
But if you had a patient that
you found out and I'm not saying deceasedor anything, but like someone claimed
suddenly lived in a crawl space of a housefor two days or something like that
(40:20):
is. Yeah.
Is there some sort of mental
disorder or conditionthat would make people
just want to bein some sort of confined dark
space alone.
In the.
Cool clinical trial?
I just yeah,at least it doesn't make sense to me,
(40:43):
but that's where we get intowhat is going on in that person's psyche
that might make them want to dosomething like that or think they want to.
Because I'm going to places like psychosiswhere we hear
voicesor see things that other people can't see.
You're here.
I don't want to disregard the potentialof spirit, the spiritual realm. But
(41:10):
what was he hearing?
Voices or seeing things chasing him?
I didn't.
Maybe it didn't exist.I don't. Know. Yeah.
That's the biggest missing piece of this.
It's not evidentiarytype details are definitely missing
in the kind of researchthat I think we can get access to,
(41:31):
unless some local from the area can goand get police reports
and whatever and actually start releasingmore really specific details.
But I honestly feel like
I want to know more about him.
To me, my own personal theory isI do think he was there was some sort
of sexual satisfactionthat he was going for in this situation.
(41:54):
And no matter how bizarre or weirdthat may be to the rest of us.
So, yeah.What what else was going on in his life?
What was he like?
Was he was he dealing with anything elsepsychologically that we don't know
about being this far awayand not having access to all the details?
I would be more interested in thatthan like how how exactly far away was his
you you know, or were there dogsthat you'd choose in the neighborhood?
(42:18):
And if he. Knew, you mean.
Why did he go to the toiletlike two days before she was home?
Because she was out of town.
Like if he knew her, did he didhe not know she was out of town?
There's weird questions like thatthat people bring up that I'm like,
I honestly would justI just care more about him.
First, I want to learn.
Yes, those are important details,but I want to know more about him
(42:39):
because I feel like that's wherea lot of the answers may lie in this.
And unfortunately,we just. Don't have those.
Answerseven in him in relation to the community.
Like like you said,there's this idea that he was friendly
with you and perhaps her boyfriend.
And so what was. Yeah, just
(43:00):
there's, there's so much missing.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we'll have more.
And honestly that's where listeners, when,where you come in is if you have a way
to research this more, reach out to peopleor you've found
actual thingsmore than just some like five
or six Chinese articlesI found with really bad translations.
(43:21):
And more than just people,people posting, I'd read it.
If you have more information,please send me an email.
A study of stranger at gmail.com,because I would love to do a follow up.
This is it's just so fascinating.
It's captivated everybody's imaginationsbecause of how bizarre and gross.
Like, there's this combinationof just like, interesting things to this.
(43:41):
There's a there's a sexual aspectto it, potentially.
There's a psychological aspect.
There's a gross factor to it.
So, yeah, if anybody knowsanything out there more to this case,
please email and we will do a follow up,maybe even have you on the show.
Whoever found it, we can do a follow upthere be so much fun.
But yeah, that is it.
Amber, this is a shorter storythan one of my deep dove.
(44:01):
True crime.
I wanted to do like a palate cleanserafter doing ghost stories all October.
I love it.
And I thought this. One would be kind of.
A palate cleanser. Good, good.
Yeah, yeah.
And I. Don't knowif I really. Thought that through
that it's a bad figure of speech.
When I was when I was writing my note.
(44:22):
So I was like, this case,I wish I had more information
or like new lightor new theories to present. And I don't.
But I just found itso fascinating that I wanted
I literally wrote down Dove inand I was like, I can't write that it.
I can't write that in my notes.
That is that is just awful.
Head first. Head first.
Yeah, this was a weird one.
(44:43):
And again, I wanted to do my age.
I have these like short recreation sceneswhich are so much fun
to do in these stories.
And just everything seemed inappropriatebecause there's I think
if we knew more if we knew more details,I think we could do some of those.
But but otherwise,I feel like you're doing justice
to the like the people involved.
Yeah. Yeah.
(45:03):
Look, I love finding interesting storiesonline and weeding through.
To find the consistencies is what I didwhen I researched this,
and it made it even more interesting.
It didn't make it less interestingto go down that rabbit hole.
It made it more interesting and raised.
It's like the rabbit hole never ends.
Yeah, and no, it never, never does.
But I love it.But thank you, Amber, so much.
(45:25):
I will have to have you onfor another episode in the future
that that doesn't involvehuman waste and strange.
But you. Know I think.
If we're going to go after
dogs of the super strangeend of season behavior, this is it.
Is it. And look.
If you end up thinking about it moreand have some sort of bizarre theory or
something, you know, we'll do a follow up,a quick little anecdote or something.
(45:49):
So sounds like it might be likechewing on this for a while.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do you want to share anythingabout where people might find you,
or do you want peopleto follow you on anything?
Yeah, well, I mean, we've all been through
a tough couple of yearsnow with the whole COVID thing,
so I'm helping a lot of folks manageour collective invitee around
(46:13):
all of those types of thingsand and the stresses in our lives.
You can follow me on Instagram.
I am at amber dot says dot shine
and my website is pacific
mft dot com slash amber dash keating
(46:33):
which let's imaginewe could put right down somewhere.
Yeah.
Now I'll put those in the show notesfor everybody and please pick it up.
You do great work.
And Amber,I didn't say that at top of the show,
but Amber is a good friend of mineand my families.
And so is your your husband, John, whoI will have to on for a murder mystery.
I got to find a good one for him to be on,but I really appreciate it.
(46:56):
And again, I went into today
having some anxiety myself about likethis one is just kind of gross.
I hope Amber isn't upset with this,but it is an interesting story.
So I really do appreciate youtaking the time out of your day to do this
and bringing some some light to it
and bringing up really good questionsthat I think tie into other things
that I'm interested inin the world of mystery.
Yeah. Yeah.
(47:16):
Thank you so much for having me on.
This was it was a lot of fun.
I mean, a great topic, honestly,because I am
endlessly fascinated by the really
out of the ordinary lens.
Out of the ordinary.
That's a good that'smaybe a good title for this one.
Thank you so much.
(47:37):
And that's our show.
Thank you so much for listening.
This is a study of strangeand that was definitely a strange case.
I wish thatI had more information on that.
And like I said in the show,if you do have information on that case
of the Fukushima man, pleaseemail study of strange at gmail.com.
I want to give a big shout outand thank you to everybody
that participated in my Halloweenspecials, Terrifying Tales
(48:01):
and also Tom Holland for his interviewaround Halloween
next week, thoughI'm very excited to announce that
we're going to be covering a UFO case,
and I feel like this is me
dip in my toes into some UFO storiesbecause I don't know them as well as I do.
Other strange mysteries.
So tune in next week for a UFO case.
(48:23):
Make sure to subscribe, rateand review the show.
Check us out on Patriot
and you can find all of the show notesand information at WW.
WW A Study of Strange Tor.com Thank you
and goodnight.
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