Cartoonist nabbed for 24,000 calls

TOKYO (Reuter): Tokyo police have arrested a frustrated cartoonist on suspicion of making as many as 24,000 prank phone calls over three years to a big publishing house that had refused to print his work, police said on Wednesday.

They said the 35-year-old man was arrested last month near a public phone booth trying to make his daily calls to the company.

The man told investigators he was angry at Kodansha, one of Japan's biggest publishers, for turning down his cartoon for the Weekly Morning, a popular comic magazine, in 1994.

Kodansha said it was not aware of the man and could not say whether he actually brought his work to their editors.

"We were at the verge of developing a nervous breakdown," said one of the editors who had been taking the daily calls.

Previous cases of malicious calls in Japan include a 55-year- old woman calling her former high school teacher 28,000 times over a year for allegedly mistreating her while she was in school and a 42-year-old man calling his ex-wife 113,000 times over 17 months.