Jun 26 (rocketnews24.com) - Despite all the talk of Japan being a homogeneous society, there is certainly a lot of distinct personalities from the secluded hikkikomori to the obsessive otaku to the punchy yet occasionally glamorous yankee.
But there is one group of people had only started to really be understood in the past decade or so: the bakkura.
The word "bakkura" is derived from "bakkureru" which can mean "to duck out of something." In an interesting cross-language linguistic move, an "-er" suffix appears to have been added to the end of this Japanese verb to denote "one who ducks out of something." However since "er" is not a pronounceable Japanese sound, it becomes "a," hence "bakkura."
A bakkura is perhaps best described as someone who will brazenly get out of doing a chore or even a part-time job without permission. A convenient translation might be a "buckler" meaning they buckle under the stress of responsibility, but that would discount all the bakkura who might just be plain lazy.
So among the bakkura research communities it was with great fanfare that an actual S-Class Bakkura was discovered in Kariya city, Aichi Prefecture. The 23-year-old woman was on her first day of a part-time job starting at 9:00 a.m. However, by 4:00 p.m. she was nowhere to be found and about 100,000 yen (US$900) that was meant to have been transferred from the cash register to the safe was gone as well.
The ensuing investigation was rather simple as the store already had all of the suspect's personal information thanks to her job application. Police say that upon arrest she confessed to the crime, thus officially putting her in the illustrious S-Class.
