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.

Some attribute the rising tide of emergency calls to the rapid ageing of Japanese society; others believe it has more to do with a more fundamental shift in the sense of responsibility.

Either way, things that were once simple annoyances to be dealt with by the individual have now escalated in people's minds to grave crises involving police intervention, according to Eiki Katayama, the chief of the Tochigi prefectural police. “Yes, we had a few of these in the past but the numbers are much, much greater now,” he said.

“People used to feel a sense of shame in calling the police for these trifles but people now feel they have the right to do so as taxpayers.”

Like the person who cycled to a railway station and telephoned the police to complain that her bottom hurt, or another who called to say that the television would not switch on. Police in one rural prefecture fielded a panicky emergency call reporting the presence of a cowpat in the street, while another demanded an immediate police response to the discovery of an oddly coloured Chinese dumpling at a grocery shop.

Akio Doteuchi, a sociologist at the NLI Nissei Research Institute, believes that the huge surge in trivial calls is prime evidence of the nation's infantilisation.

“Japanese society doesn't have a structure of independence or any sense of self-help,” he said. “Both adults and the younger generation just live their lives counting on others. It all reflects the irrationality of modern Japan.”

The daftest calls to the emergency police lines

I can’t seem to cook my rice

My back trouble doesn’t seem to be improving

I need a good karaoke place

My fork seems to be bent

I think there may be something on my head

I can’t work out how to use my mobile

There’s no toilet paper in this public lavatory

Is today rubbish day?

I think my daughter needs to take a day off

I think the people in Utsunomiya are very cold-hearted

There’s a nest of sparrows that has broken

You have to feed my pets while I’m away on holiday

I can’t get a monkey off my car

I need you to give me a morning wake-up call tomorrow

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