Japanese Prevent Illegal Trash Dumping By Invoking Fear Of Vengeful Gods

An enterprising company in Osaka has found the key to protection against illegal trash dumpers:

The little wooden gates standing 1 meter high and 70 centimeters wide are being stuck in areas where people had been throwing away trash illegally and are selling like hotcakes among Japanese municipal governments because they’re working so well at scaring wrongdoers away.

Osaka-based New Material reports having sold around 3,000 mini-torii gates since it started offering them in 2003.

“If you’re Japanese, you’re bound to have some sort of fear of the gods. We started making them because we thought that if you stick a torii gate up in an area where people have been illegally dumping trash, people are going to think twice before throwing anything else away for fear that the gods may punish them and won’t dump anything,” New Material’s president tells Cyzo.

The mini-torii gates cost 5,000 yen apiece and can be installed simply by pushing them into the ground. They are considerably cheaper than the cost of setting up a security camera, and much more cost-effective than sending patrols out to monitor illegal trash dumping spots.

Now that the media has reported the fact that the wooden gates are not actually real torii, will they still be able to prevent illegal dumping?