Japan's Great Train Robbery: The 70,000 Missing Condom Mystery

There are a lot of strange things that go on here in Japan. One thing that happened recently was the theft of 70,000 condoms from one of Japan's biggest condom makers (pun intended). 

You read right. Someone stole 70,000 condoms. A huge crime (pun intended). Weird? well, yes but the details make it even stranger. There a devil in the details. Read on. 


The weird part about this crime dawned on me when I read the report. First off, here from Canada's Canoe News:

KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysian police said Tuesday they were investigating the disappearance of more than 700,000 ultrathin condoms which went missing in transit between Malaysia and Japan.

Sagami Rubber Industries, Japan's first condom maker, said last week that the shipment was loaded into a container at its factory in northern Malaysia, but that it was empty with the locks replaced when it arrived in Tokyo.

"We take the matter of the missing condoms very seriously... we are investigating the matter," a Malaysian police spokesman told AFP.

Sato Koji, manager of the Sagami rubber factory in Malaysia's Perak state, said they had lodged a police report over the loss of the shipment.

"We are unhappy over the incident. This is the first time such a thing has happened since our Malaysian production started in 1997," he told AFP.

Officials at Sagami's head office have said that the prophylactics, which it bills as being 14 percent thinner than conventional ones, are worth 1.5 million dollars at Japanese retail prices.

Freight forwarders say goods being shipped out of Malaysia go missing routinely and that many cases are inside jobs.

"There are locks, seals and checklists provided by freight forwarders and shipping lines for every part of the journey from factory to destination so it is very easy to find out where and when they were tampered with or changed," said Air Freight Forwarders Association of Malaysia head Walter Cullas.

I would never steal 70,000 condoms... But when you tell me that they are worth a half-million US dollars then I can understand someone stealing them.

I wonder how they are going to unload (pun intended) them? Is this the beginning of a rise (pun intended) in crime?   

But, the part that really strikes me as weird, and wasn't reported in the regular news reports, was the fact that when the Japanese company received the cargo container in Japan and opened the locks, they found it empty - but it was still locked. Isn't that weird? 


70,000 condoms stolen yet the criminals replace the broken locks with new ones?


Why would anyone steal something and then replace the locks with different locks? I mean, if you steal them and the cargo carrier container then becomes empty, why put locks on it? Wouldn't those locks just help the police with clues, like finger prints or something, when they come looking for you?


Isn't that weird? Or maybe the criminals replaced the locks because they were being polite?

Here is a real TV commercial by this condom maker for this brand of condoms. This is pretty weird too. I'm sure, with these kinds of TV commercials, their sales go up (pun not intended).