Sleep Tissue Massage: Man Locked Into Department Store After He Falls Asleep in Ultra-Relaxing Chair

Disclaimer: While this article is based on cold hard facts, we’ve massaged the truth a bit with a very comfortable amount of satire.

Japan is known within Asia and around the world for its large, fancy department stores. A typical store is five to ten stories high and sells everything from food to cosmetics to kimonos to furniture.

Many stores are over 100 years old. A portion of those still operating were initially developed and built—and are still run today—by rail companies, so they could have retail attached to their terminals for passengers. 

While in the United States, department stores are on an observably precipitous decline, in Japan, they are (for the moment) thriving, despite challenges like competition from online shopping, population trends and, men buying their mistresses jewelry while their long-suffering wives get nothing but a JONI MITCHELL CD, not that we are still hanging onto that. 

Some stores have electronics departments with all kinds of equipment including massage chairs, which, now that we think of it, might prompt us to stop into Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s during a tough day in midtown to browse the selection of relaxing machines. But one unlucky shopper found himself so relaxed by the chairs that he woke up a couple of hours later to find himself locked inside the store—while he dozed off, closing time had come and gone. 

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, the man was able to share pictures of his predicament on Twitter, to the delight and entertainment of thousands.

(For those who click through to his profile, be warned that his interests evidently encompass exactly two general areas: cars, and vaguely inappropriate anime drawings of female characters. Happy perusing!)

After tweeting into the void for help, the man managed to set off a motion-detecting alarm inside the store, summoning the police. After ten (that’s right, 10!) officers searched him to verify that he wasn’t a shoplifter (we have a few questions about how anyone could conceal a massage chair on their person to steal, though we guess the store is big enough that he could take something smaller, like a blender or a mini-fridge), they contacted the store manager who had mistakenly locked him in. Apologies were reportedly made and received all around. 

None of the coverage of the incident tells us the really important information: What make and model chair he was sitting in, and did he end up purchasing it? We look forward to mounting our own independent investigation.