Oh Crisscross News, thank you so much for a story about everybody’s favorite Japan-related topic, panty theft:

YOKOHAMA — Kanagawa prefectural police on Wednesday re-arrested a 46-year-old man on charges of stealing women’s underwear, local media reported Thursday. The man, identified as Kazuo Miyake, was arrested earlier this month for trespassing. When police searched his home in Kanazawa Ward, they confiscated about 2,500 items of women’s underwear.

“I have never been able to speak to women, so collecting their underwear gave me pleasure,” Miyake was quoted as saying. Police said that he had placed the panties underneath his futon and was sleeping on them. Miyake has admitted to stealing underwear for the past 10 years, police said. He was apprehended while he was going through the washing machine in an apartment near his home late at night on Aug 1, police said.

Accompanying the story was the above image, which brings to mind the image of police men carefully lining up 2500 items of women’s underwear along the floor of a room to create a wonderful media photo-op. It must be a common practice in such cases, since the previous story about an underwear thief in Nagoya had a similar image attached. In other countries the police line up bags of cocaine, assault rifles and grenades. In Japan, there’s panties.