TOKYO — An American tourist has been arrested in Japan and accused of carving letters into a pillar of a gate to a shrine in Tokyo.
Steve Lee Hayes, 65, was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of property damage, a spokesman from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department confirmed.
Hayes, a U.S. citizen, had “carved alphabet letters onto a pillar of a gate of a shrine” in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo on Tuesday, police said. It’s not clear what state Hayes is from.
The Japan Times reported that the letters were carved into a wooden pillar of a traditional entrance, known as a torii gate, at the Meiji Shrine.
Hayes, who is alleged to have used his fingernails to etch five letters onto one of the torii gates, was identified as the suspect by security video around the shrine, the newspaper reported.
It’s not clear whether he remains in custody.
Meiji Shrine is a Shinto shrine and popular tourist destination in Tokyo that “commemorate(s) the virtue of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken who took the initiative to make a foundation of modernized Japan,” according to its website.
Torii gates are iconic structures that mark the boundary between the everyday and the sacred at Shinto shrines across Japan.
Defacing sites or breaking the rules at important international sites has led to charges and serious fines for tourists on many occasions.
Last year, a tourist was arrested after he was caught on video defacing the wall of the Colosseum in Rome by carving a love note into it. In 2017, Thai authorities fined two American tourists for public indecency for posing for a “butt selfie” in front of a famous Buddhist temple.
And in 2022, a tourist who climbed the steps of the Temple of Kukulcán, in the center of Chichen Itza in Mexico, was arrested and fined because climbing the Mayan ruins is prohibited, The Independent reported.
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