Send the Virtual Ginza a note.
"He was our most computer-savvy employee, even the mayor used to come to him for advice," relates a staff member of the Urasoe City office in Okinawa. "Unfortunately no one realized that he was so lacking in morals and common sense. Considering his elite position here, we're all in shock over his behavior."
As reported in Shukan Shincho (A weekly tabloid) (1/16), the incident came to light last month when the Okinawa Prefectural Police nabbed an unnamed 43-year-old man employed as an assistant manager in the city office's data policy section. The charge was peddling pornographic DVDs via e-mail from his terminal at work.
The accused was the key individual in Urasoe's "Cyber Town" plan (Click here for a .pdf document outlining the plan), which aims to computerize the city's records and link residents electronically with the city office. He must have grown a bit bored with his mundane tasks at the keyboard so to amuse himself in his off hours, and make a little money on the side, he began ordering porno DVDs via mail order from the United States.
While the source of the discs was foreign, the contents were mostly domestic: "urabon" discs showing unexpurgated (and therefore illegal) sex scenes between male and female Japanese actors. The city worker ran off copies of the discs on his DVD recorder at home and then set up shop, peddling them to co-workers and others from his terminal in city hall.
The police got wind of it and arrested him on December 14 on charges of peddling pornography. After spending two nights in the local jail, the uncivil servant was subsequently fined 200,000 yen, and also subjected to administrative punishment which mounted to in this case a five-month suspension from work without pay. The 14 coworkers who purchased the bootleg DVDs from him include two who happened to be his supervisors were also hit with pay cuts of from one to two months.
The city office has since been flooded with complaints from irate citizens understandably reluctant to entrust their confidential data to such a sleazy individual. Urasoe's authorities are now mulling use of an outside firm to complete the project.