The 65-year-old man allegedly told police he had defaced the Shinto shrine as a ‘joke’.

Japanese police arrested a 65-year-old American tourist for allegedly defacing a shrine in Tokyo.

The man, identified as Steve Hayes, is accused of using his nails to scratch five letters into a torii gate at the Meiji Jingu shrine on Tuesday morning.

According to police, Hayes said he jokingly wrote the name of a family member on the door, which represents the border between the sacred worlds of the Shinto religion.

Staff at the Meiji Jingu shrine, built in 1920 to honor the spirits of Emperor Meiji and his wife, Empress Shoken, noticed the damage and notified police the same day, and Hayes was arrested on Wednesday.

It was not immediately clear how Hayes, who authorities said arrived in Japan with his family on Monday, was identified or what charges he might face.

This is the second incident at a shrine in Japan’s capital this week.

On Monday, police said an investigation was launched after the kanji character meaning “death” was written on two points on a stone wall at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine in memory of Japan’s war dead.

The announcement follows two incidents of vandalism at the same mausoleum in recent months, which has caused diplomatic friction with China and other Asian countries over Japan’s commemoration of World War II leaders.

In June, the word “toilet” was found spray-painted in red on a stone pillar at the shrine, and images of a man urinating on the monument circulated on social media.

In July, a Chinese man living in Japan was charged with property damage and desecration of a place of worship, while two other Chinese men were also put on the wanted list.

Police said that Chinese characters and some letters of the Latin alphabet were written on the tomb with a black felt-tip pen in August.

Japan welcomed a record 17.78 million foreign visitors in the first half of this year, and the weak yen helped tourist numbers rise above pre-pandemic levels.

The influx of visitors has given Japan’s economy a boost, but it has also sparked grumbling from some locals fed up with visitors’ bad behavior and violations of cultural etiquette.