A 65-year-old American tourist, identified as Steve Hayes, has been arrested for allegedly defacing a historic Tokyo shrine, Al Jazeera reports.
Hayes is accused of scratching five letters into a torii gate at the Meiji Jingu shrine on Tuesday morning. He reportedly told police he was “pranking” by inscribing the name of a family member on the gate, a sacred structure representing the boundary between the living world and the sacred in Shinto belief.
Meiji Jingu shrine staff discovered the damage on Tuesday and immediately contacted authorities. Hayes, who arrived in Japan with his family on Monday, was arrested on Wednesday. The method by which police identified Hayes remains unclear, as do the specific charges he faces.
This is the second reported incident of shrine defacement in Tokyo this week. On Monday, police launched an investigation into graffiti depicting the kanji character for “death” on a stone wall at the Yasukuni Shrine, a site dedicated to Japan’s war dead and a source of ongoing diplomatic tension with China and other Asian nations.
The Yasukuni Shrine has been the target of multiple acts of vandalism in recent months. In June, the word “toilet” was spray-painted on a stone pillar, and video emerged online showing a man urinating on the monument. A Chinese man living in Japan was subsequently charged with property damage and desecration of a place of worship in July, while two other Chinese men remain wanted in connection with these incidents. Further defacement involving Chinese characters and Latin letters was reported in August.
The recent surge in tourism, with a record 17.78 million foreign visitors in the first half of the year, has fueled economic growth but also led to increased complaints about disrespectful behavior and cultural insensitivity among some tourists.
