It’s fair to say that the people of Kasuya, a sleepy town in western Japan, had never given much thought to Japan’s homeless problem. But that all changed this week when one of its residents noticed that food had been mysteriously disappearing from his fridge.

Convinced that he was the victim of frequent burglaries, the 57-year-old resident installed security cameras that transmitted images from the inside of his house directly to his mobile phone. The culprit was not, as it turned out, a highly skilled and hungry burglar, but a middle-aged, homeless woman who had been living on the top shelf of his closet for several months.