May 11, 2018 (Japan Today) - With service for two train lines and one subway line, Tokyo’s Kinshicho Station has a lot of people buying tickets every day. But for the past few weeks, they’ve been joined by a crow, who, lacking any money of his own, has taken to stealing human commuters’ prepaid cards and attempting to purchase a ticket of his own.
Following the most highly publicized incident, which was captured on video, the crow once again stole a person’s card, and this time, instead of sticking it in the ticket machine, dropped it on the roof of a nearby taxi. But despite its apparent interest in vehicular transportation, the crow almost ended up going for a very long, unintentional ride.
Earlier this week, “Ticket Crow,†as he’s become known, was captured, as shown in the photo tweeted by Japanese Twitter user @yuruhuwa_kdenpa.
It wasn’t animal control officers who caught the bird, either, but a woman who lives in the area. Seeing the crow hanging around Kinshicho Station, the woman felt it would be happier in a more natural environment than downtown Tokyo, and took it upon herself to capture it. After looking after it for a month or so to make sure it was in good health, she planned to “take it into the mountains, where the air is clean, and release it,†citing Nagano Prefecture as a possible candidate for the bird’s new home.
However, while Ticket Crow ended up in a cage, the woman has ended up in trouble with the law. The woman didn’t catch the crow because her methods were more effective the station staff’s, but because the rail workers weren’t actually trying to catch it. Capturing crows without legal authorization is a violation of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Law, and carries a penalty of up to one year in prison or a fine of one million yen. Since no permission to capture the crow had been handed down from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the station workers had simply been chasing it off whenever it appeared.
