KINOKAWA CITY , JAPAN — A Japanese civil servant was suspended from his job for three months and demoted after officials discovered he spent nearly as much time surfing pornographic websites as working, his supervisor said.The unnamed 57-year-old man, an official in the construction division of Kinokawa City in the western part of the country, spent as many as three hours every day viewing porn sites on an office computer, according to city administrators. Computer usage logs indicated the man made more than 780,000 visits to porn sites over a nine-month period. More than 177,000 hits were logged in July 2007 alone, investigators said.

Although reportedly the man had been engaging in the online antics since June 2007, his activity was not discovered until February, when technicians reported frequently cleaning his computer of the same virus. Allegedly, the computer acquired the virus from one of the unspecified sites the man visited regularly.

“These were foreign adult sites, and they got through the security net” the city installed on its computers, city official Kazuhiko Ueyama told Reuters. “The man apologized each time we spoke to him, but we couldn’t quite get him to explain to us why he did this.”

Despite the frequency of the man’s surfing habit, his colleagues were unaware of his behavior because of the way desks are situated in the office, one official noted.

The porn surfer began his suspension on Thursday.