“Police in southern Japan arrested a man for stealing shoes at a local hospital, then later stumbled upon a collection in his home of 440 women’s shoes — all for the left foot… Police arrested Ichiro Irie, 45, Saturday on suspicion of stealing two shoes at the hospital. In a subsequent search of his home, police found a box overflowing with the left sides of 440 pairs of women’s shoes, including high heels, patent leather pumps, sandals and nurses’ shoes. When questioned, Irie told police he had ‘a penchant for women’s feet,’ the major daily Yomiuri newspaper said. It wasn’t clear why he seemed to prefer the left foot.” — Guardian Unlimited (UK)

One of the things you learn after analyzing a lot of fetishes is that the categories into which they are lumped don’t always do them justice. You can say that a coprophile fetishizes excrement, and yet that doesn’t really help to explain why one person prefers a golden shower while another develops an inexplicable lust for the urine deposited in airport bathrooms. Yes, both individuals like urine, but do they really have the same fetish?

Certainly the case of the left-foot fetishist points this up. You automatically assume that, for the foot fetishist, any foot will do. The human body is symmetrical, so why should he care which foot he slobbers over? And yet the truth is that many people develop asymmetrical preferences of one kind or another. When a couple holds hands, often they fall into the habit of man on the right, woman on the left, or vice versa, and if they change sides it seems wrong. So too with this foot fetish. This Japanese guy likes the left foot. Is that really so strange? Maybe he has some obvious practical reason for stealing left shoes — like, he masturbates with his right hand, so he holds the shoe in his left — or maybe he puts it on, and his left foot is smaller than his right — or whatever. Or on the other hand, maybe left-ness is somehow essential to his fetish. Whatever primal trauma sparked his fetish had to do with his mother’s left foot. Who knows? Suffice to say that he’s not mentally unbalanced just because his fetish is asymmetrical.

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