It was every Japanese housewife's worst nightmare: alone in the house, scared, confused and unable to staunch a baffling flow of thick syrupy liquid. Gripped by fear, she lunged for the telephone and alerted the police.

“Help me!” the woman pleaded down the emergency service hotline, “my ice-cream is melting.”

A year or two ago, the call might have been dismissed as a schoolboy prank or demented ramblings but for the police in Tochigi prefecture in eastern Japan, the panic-stricken cry for help was part of something much bigger — a national trend known as youchi-ka, or the creeping “infantilisation” of Japan.

Japanese adults, say police across the country, are calling hyakutouban — the equivalent of the British 999 — for increasingly trivial and ridiculous domestic reasons. In Kyoto, it is calculated that more than a quarter of emergency calls to the police involve no crime or danger and often represent the mildest everyday inconveniences.

The new flood of calls has included numerous complaints by men that their girlfriends have left them and others that vending machines have failed to return the correct change. Some demand immediate police responses to irregularities with train timetables or simply express general qualms: one person dialled 110 to declare a fear of snakes and seek official advice.

Now, in exasperation at the deluge of calls, the police have published lists of the daftest emergency appeals in an attempt to shame the public into laying off the hotline and leaving it clear for genuine emergencies. A mass pamphlet campaign is being organised to encourage people to deal with life's little upsets themselves rather than calling in uniformed officers.

surely most of them are pranks, I remember young tsonda doing the same