＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:https://skawa68.com/
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
It was December about 30 years ago when I was still an active office worker. Although I had not been drinking alcohol, I must have been at the peak of fatigue from working overtime until midnight every day, and I fell asleep on a seat of a regular train a few trains before the last train.
The train was full when it left Osaka Station, but passengers were getting off one after another, and when it passed Ibaraki Station, the train was sparsely populated.
As I dozed off, something touched the pocket in the back of my pants where my wallet was and I felt the passenger next to me come over and hug my shoulder. There was no way I knew anyone on the train at this hour.
I woke up with a start and looked next to me. The man jerked away from me. I looked around the car and saw two men in the couplings on either side of the car, who I assumed were “guards” to keep other passengers out of the car. I couldn’t help but glare at them. The three men quickly fled to another car.
I almost became a victim of “pickpockets targeting comatose people” (pickpockets posing as caregivers). The reason I was able to escape this situation with my quick thinking was because I had heard on the news a few days earlier that coma pickpocketing had become a frequent occurrence on trains late at night recently.
From December to January, there will be more opportunities to drink alcohol at “year-end parties” and “New Year’s parties,” so please be very careful everyone.
Incidentally, a recent report detailed how a “semi-gang” in Osaka’s Minami district uses young girls to approach drunk customers, lure them into “girls bars” and rip them off. While advertising “all-you-can-drink,” they charge tens to hundreds of thousands of yen for drinks by the young girls working there, and customers who refuse to pay are threatened with imprisonment or assault by the men who are “collecting the money.”
In the year through October of this year, approximately 260 people claimed a total of 22 million yen in damages. It is easy to imagine that the damage would be much greater if the number of people who “cried themselves to sleep” and the amount of money involved were included.
It is recommended to “refrain” from after-parties as much as possible, but even if you do, it seems safer to round them off “in moderation.
Incidentally, as an aside, there is a word very similar to “coma pickpocket” called “coma robbery.” “Coma pickpocket” is a crime in which money or valuables are stolen from the pockets of a sleeping person without them noticing, and is considered a theft crime under the Criminal Code (Article 235 of the Criminal Code). In contrast, “coma robbery” is defined in Article 239 of the Criminal Code as a crime in which “a person’s consciousness is impaired (by mixing drugs into their drink, for example) and they are unable to resist, and their property is stolen.” I explained this for future reference. As an aside, there is a heartwarming rakugo story called “Ichimonbue” with a pickpocket as the main character. It is a “new rakugo” by Katsura Beicho III. If you are interested, please give it a listen.