A recent article in the Asahi Shimbun described a small cross section of consumers who take advantage of a peculiar aspect of mail-order sales in Japan. Some small- and medium-sized sales agents who do their business over the Internet have problems with customers who don't pay. In most cases, Internet and mail order sales are done on a prepaid basis: The buyer either provides credit/debit card information or makes a bank/post office money transfer prior to the item being shipped. But a few work on what can best be described as the honor system. They send the item to the buyer with a bill that the buyer pays after receiving the item. Sometimes the bill has a handling fee attached and sometimes it doesn't.

According to the Asahi article, some people don't pay up, and perhaps never intended to. A non-profit organization called the Mail Order Unpaid Protection Network (MOUPN), which monitors such scofflaws, estimates that mail-order sales companies lose about ¥20 billion a year to such people.

Asahi, in fact, found one, though he seems reluctant to admit it. In the article, a reporter visits an unnamed man "in his 50s living in an apartment in Tokyo." The man receives an order of green tea by courier, but the reporter notes that the name on the package is that of a woman. "I made the order on behalf of a friend," the man explains. When asked why he didn't use his real name, the man doesn't answer. Other packages arrive addressed to different women. When asked what's in one of them the man shrugs and says, "Maybe food?" He insists that he will pay for it but usually "just forgets."