Sex Doll Rescued From River After Being Mistaken for Dead Woman

Emergency services in Japan rushed to save a woman from drowning, before pulling her to safety and discovering it was actually a rubber love doll.

The incident was witnessed on Friday by YouTuber Tanaka Natsuki, who was in the area filming a separate fishing video for her account when police, firefighters and ambulances turned up to the coast of Hachinohe, located in the north-east of Japan.

Natsuki tweeted: "While I was filming for my fishing video, I thought that a corpse had come floating by, but it turned out to be a Dutch wife," using a common name for the dolls.

The YouTuber, who generally posts videos about her visits to hot springs, then confirmed that another passerby also believed the sex doll was a woman and called the emergency services, according to Today.

"It seems someone misunderstood what it was and called the authorities, so a ton of police, fire trucks, and ambulances showed up. Thankfully the 'wife' was safely rescued. Nice," she tweeted.

Images shared to Twitter showed the doll upside down in the water and a large crowd gathered by the edge of the harbour watching the emergency services pulling the doll to land.

Love dolls are thought by some owners to have souls and that it is bad luck to throw them away with the rest of a person's rubbish.

In January 2020, The Human Love Doll Company, a Japanese company whose slogan is "love dolls are born to be loved," launched a full funeral service for dolls that are no longer needed in order to make it easier for owners to say goodbye to them.

There is a standard Doll Funeral Plan costing $452.19 (50,000 yen) that includes a funeral, memorial service and a commemorative video of the ceremony, as well as a Doll Angel Funeral Plan priced at $813.94 (90,000 yen), which allows the owner to attend.

There have been several instances of love and sex dolls being mistaken for human bodies over the years. In the U.S. in July 2020, police were alerted to a dead body on railway tracks, before officers checked it and discovered that it was a doll.

In that incident, officers in Allenhurst, Georgia, even reportedly covered the doll with a sheet when they arrived at the scene as they still believed it was a human.

Detectives then inspected the body after the coroner arrived at the scene and quickly realised that the body was not a human but instead a female-presenting sex doll.