Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that breaks you out of your routine and maybe prison...

I'm your host this week, Shea, and with me is: Aaron

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that prisons in Australia are really just budget Inception.

Jailbreak Jamboree

My past few stories have been pretty heavy lately so this week I wanted to break the pattern, break out of the heavy stories into something fun and a bit more ridiculous. Break out of prison maybe, yeah! Today I’m going to tell you about some of the most daring and crazy prison escapes I could find.

In Japan, the Meiji Era, which spanned from 1868 to 1912, was considered one of the harsher periods for prisoners, so escaping prison was actually more common. In 1881, a record number of convicts, 1821, were able to make successful getaways from incarceration to escape their harsh terrible sentences.

No other man in history has shown such disdain for incarceration than Yoshie Shiratori, known as the most famous escapee in Japan of all times, who was tagged as “the man that no prison could hold.” Yoshie successfully escaped the Japanese prison system 4 times!

Yoshie’s first work was in a tofu shop, he later worked as a fisherman crew that catches crabs for Russia. After changing failed businesses several times, he became known for addictive gambling and stealing.

Yoshie was initially accused of murder and robbery and was sentenced to Aomori prison. Three years later, he picked the lock of his handcuffs with a short wire he found from a wooden bathing bucket.

Police recaptured him after three days and he was sentenced to life in prison for escaping and for supposedly stealing supplies from a hospital. He was eventually transferred to Akita prison in 1942.

At Akita prison, Yoshie managed to escape by somehow climbing the impossible smooth walls of his cell to reach the air vent. He would climb up and down every night and eventually unhinged the vent to extricate himself.

Perhaps he was exhausted from all the running and hiding, he decided to go to the home of a police officer, the only person who had shown any benevolence towards him from his previous prison in Aomori. However, this officer eventually handed Yoshie over to the authorities, and he vowed to never place his trust in another police officer ever again.

Yoshie was transferred for the second time to Abashiri Prison, which was located in a remote locale in Northern Hokkaido. Abashiri was no regular penal colony. It was reserved for the worst kinds of criminals in Japan. He was transferred here because he had already escaped two times, and the police wanted him to stay put.

The man had an endless pool of ingenuity, so this time, each morning he would spit miso soup on the doorframe of his cell. The salts and moisture eventually corroded and weakened the door frame.

When the wartime blackout of August 26, 1944, occurred Yoshie dislocated his shoulders and squeezed himself out of the small space on the metal frame where the guards would slide in his food. Once again, Yoshie’s escape was publicized, and made the headlines of several newspapers.

Yoshie was caught once again and this time sentenced to death. Additionally, he was assigned six armed guards, and he was under surveillance, 24 hours per day.

At the Sapporo prison, he was incarcerated in a specially made cell that was designed to prevent him from escaping through the air vent in the ceiling. This would be the largest defect in the setup because too much attention to the ceiling meant the floor of the cell was more or less ignored.

The prison guards at Sapporo had so much faith in the newly renovated cell that they no longer bothered to handcuff their prisoner. This would be mistake number two.