@samuelszuchan: A Japanese school principal paid for a regular coffee at a convenience store and pressed the large button, a difference of 70 yen, about 48 cents. That one button press ended a 40-year career and wiped out his teaching license and a retirement payout that averages 23 million yen, about $158,000, for longtime teachers in his prefecture. He was 59, a few months from 60, the age when Japanese school employees must retire, and he ran a junior high in Takasago, near Kobe. On December 21st, 2023, a clerk watched him press the button and called the police. He admitted to seven occasions since June, three at that store and four at another. Prosecutors in Himeji declined to charge him: they agreed it was theft, but too trivial for court, so he walked away from the criminal system without a charge. His employer was not so forgiving. On January 30th the Hyogo prefectural board of education dismissed him for grave misconduct. The board punishes staff by a public rulebook, and its rule for an employee who steals someone else's property allows only two punishments: dismissal or suspension. There is no minimum amount; stealing 70 yen and stealing 70,000 yen fall under that same rule. The board chose dismissal because he did it knowingly six more times after the first, and because teachers who stole repeatedly had been dismissed before. Then the law did the rest: the retirement ordinance pays nothing to anyone dismissed for discipline, and Article 10 of the teacher-licensing law lapses a teacher's license automatically on dismissal. So the same month he was supposed to collect a career's worth of gratitude, he lost all of it. Nobody ever asked whether losing the money and the license was fair for 70 yen of coffee. And the board's other choice, suspension, would have let him keep both and retire in March with only a few months' pay docked. When the story broke, people across Japan spent a week arguing about one question: should a principal be fired over 490 yen of coffee? The much bigger losses, the retirement money and the license, barely came up, because the board never decided to take them. The law stripped both automatically the moment he was fired.

Sam Szuchan

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Monday 28 September 2026 22:00:00 GMT