Fame fuelled fire starter

After being arrested for torching a car last year in Suwa, Nagano Prefecture, and subsequently held for further questioning in regards to several other blazes in the same area, 21-year-old blogger and busty idol wannabe Erika Hirata was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Monday.

A hefty sentence for a series of crimes that appear to have been committed to boost the profile of the town they occurred in, and also Hirata-san’s bid to become a famous idol. Pictures of the fires posted on the young restaurant worker’s website perhaps not unexpectedly attracting the wrong kind of attention.

Yet despite her admission of “I did it to get feelings of irritation off my chest, and I wanted to make Suwa famous,” Hirata arguably already had what it takes to become a Japanese idol without the need for such drastic action. As going off the success of other similarly built stars, her ample enough assets would quite possibly have taken her to wherever it was she wanted to go.