日本男子在马路隔离带上种香蕉树
A Japanese man of about 50 from Kurume City, Fukuoka Prefecture, was recently ordered to remove three banana trees he had illegally planted and cared for in the median strip (中央隔离带) of a busy city road for a couple of years. It’s unclear why the man chose to plant the trees on public property, and in a median strip of all places, but they eventually got so big that they began to impinge on drivers’ field of view. That might lead to traffic accidents.
It wasn’t difficult for authorities to identify the man responsible for the trees, as he had been watering the plants at least twice a day for the last two years. How the unnamed banana lover managed to remain off the radar (巡视) of the police for so long, especially with his daily habit of watering, remains a mystery. And he was ordered to remove the trees, or risk spending up to a year in jail (监狱) or pay a fine of 500,000 yen ($3,350).
And the Kurume banana trees had been getting nationwide attention for weeks, and on the day of their removal, news journalists from major news channels were on location. They interviewed the man who had planted them and filmed him trying to eat one of the unripe bananas harvested from them. It was too green to be eaten, but the man ate it anyway. “It’s lonely… I feel lonely without my beautiful bananas,” the man told journalists after having to remove the three banana trees.
Luckily, the banana trees have found new homes. Two of them wound up in the garden of an 80-year-old man who promised to take good care of them, and “Kurume’s banana man” gave the third one to a friend as a birthday present.