pr0n sold: http://page18.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/a ... enlargeimg
83-year-old retiree arrested for selling explicit pre-war photos online
Life as a retiree isn’t exactly easy. Sure, you don’t have to get up and go to work every morning, but that also means you don’t have a very substantial income. While your retirement checks might help you put food on the table, they’ll probably seem a bit underwhelming as you get even older. And in Japan, you can’t even go out and get a depressing job as a greeter at Wal-mart.
But there’s always Yahoo! Auction, where you can sell any manner of things you might have lying around the house. Old instruments, old clothes, old dolls, or even, what the heck, how about some old pornographic photos? Any of those are sure to fetch a tidy sum online, but you might want to be careful about those explicit photos–they could very well end up with you getting arrested, as one 83-year-old Tokyo retiree learned!
According to various Japanese news sources, 83-year-old retiree Yasuji Shibata was arrested for selling obscene material via an Internet auction in April for 3,400 yen (about US$28) after police found explicit photos in his home on November 16. While you may be imagining something deviant involving carrots and horses right now, it turns out the photos weren’t nearly so scandalous. In fact, the pictures, which were apparently originally taken before World War II in either the Taisho or Showa period, were downright tame in comparison to whatever dirty websites you visit when your mom isn’t around.
The photos, some of which were black and white and others sepia, depicted men and women in various poses and states of undress. However, Shibata, it turns out, wasn’t the original photographer–he apparently bought them at a kottoushi, basically a Japanese flea market, in Yurakucho, Tokyo in December 2009.
