Upskirt Photos Hidden Camera Shoes Confiscated by Japanese Police, Who Also Visit Customers At Home

Japanese Peeping Toms have not had an easy time of it this past summer. Some 1,500 owners of “tosatsu shoes,” or shoes with built-in, remote-controlled cameras hidden in mesh that are used to take so-called upskirt photos, were paid a visit by the Kyoto police asking owners to hand over the shoes, Mainichi Japan reported in its Thursday editions.

The police knew where the upskirt shot aficionados lived because during a raid of a major camera-shoe supplier, police also grabbed a list of his 1,500 customers and their delivery addresses. Although it’s not illegal to own the shoes, and the tosatsu shoe-owning men were not compelled by law to hand them over to police, most did so, according to the news story. Other buyers told police they had discarded the shoes. When handing over the camera-embedded shoes, they also were asked to fill out a “disposal request” form indicating what the purpose of their shoe purchase was.

During the mid-July raid of the tosatsu-shoe supplier, police arrested a 26-year-old manager for “aiding voyeurism,” a violation of the Nuisance Prevention Ordinance, fined him and others $4,500, and confiscated his inventory. Later that month, when a man from Okayama was arrested for attempting to take a picture under a young girl’s skirt at an aquarium in Osaka, they learned that the shoes he used were from the same company they had raided. It turns out that from 2012 to 2014, the store had sold more than 2,500 pairs with a total revenue estimated at $550,000.

The police consider their efforts so successful that they're urging other local police departments in Japan to follow similar, if unorthodox, procedures.

Meantime, in the U.S., the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recently struck down a part of the state penal code that banned people from taking photos or videos up women’s skirts in public, saying it violated photographers' First Amendment guarantee of free speech.