I was traveling through the urban jungle I call Coruscant -but others call Shibuya, Tokyo- when I found a flock of cell phones poised in the air taking snapshots of this little guy. Contrary to what those fuckwads at ABC News and CNN reported the trains were NOT shut down or delayed, and neither was the station. I keep telling you good folks back home not to believe shit just because "they said so on TV" but nobody listens. No wonder the economy is in the toilet. Coincidentally, I took the 10:15 Limited Express (see pic @ bottom). Here's the story from local English-language news with a couple pics- one of the monkey and one of Shibuya, out on the street, Enjoy, my friends. --J.J.V.
TOKYO (Reuters) - A rogue monkey holed up at a Tokyo train station for more than two hours on Wednesday before giving dozens of net-wielding police officers the slip among crowds of excited children and passersby.
"It's a monkey - it's not like it did anything bad," a police spokesman said, adding that the animal was still on the loose.
The monkey was spotted hopping around by the automatic ticket gates at a train line in Shibuya Station in central Tokyo at about 9:40 a.m. .
It then ran downstairs to the entrance to another line, climbed up and down a pillar and ran around the ticketing machines before taking refuge on top of a train information board for two hours, a spokeswoman for railway operator Tokyu Corp said.
Television footage showed the 60-cm-tall brown monkey sitting calmly on top of the board, blinking and looking down at the crowd.
Around 30 police officers and other officials cleared the area and surrounded the animal with green netting, but at noon it jumped off the information board and escaped through the crowd.
"I've heard of mice before, but nothing like this," said Jiro Umegaki, a spokesman for Tokyo Metro Co Ltd.
(Reporting by Yoko Kubota; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
