Police in Kumamoto Prefecture reported late Tuesday that a masked man holding a chainsaw who was seen walking down a street was only trying to scare his colleagues with a costume ahead of Halloween, the national daily Asahi Shimbun said Wednesday.
Relayed in multiple tweets by witnesses fearing bloodshed, the reported sighting of the young man prompted the police to converge on the scene in patrol cars, and the riot squad joined the investigation.
The police said they received a report from a citizen at 6:50 p.m. on Tuesday. A little after 7:30 p.m., they found a man in a kimono covering his face with headgear looking like a black-and-white tiger at the commercial area in the city of Kumamoto.
But a policeman determined that the man, in his 20s, works part-time at one of the tenants in the commercial complex and he only wanted to terrify his colleagues. The chainsaw he had with him was a toy, the newspaper said.