It's a fair cop?

"I was fairly flying along the expressway at about 140 when the cops pulled me over. The cop's eyes rolled when he saw I was a foreigner. He spoke at me apprehensively in Japanese. I smiled and said, 'nihongo tabemasen (I don't eat Japanese)'. The cop groaned and with visions of mounting paperwork (in English!) he let me continue on my way."

Cue large guffaws, slaps of the thigh, and pats on the back. How cleverly deceitful this foreign resident (fluent in Japanese) had been.

This was the first story I heard about Japanese police. Since then there have been many more.

Those in uniform stand out. They make an easy target for criticism. But sometimes you can't help noticing that the uniform changes the human for the worse. It's the power. Isn't it? Whether it is a strutting football referee, officious security guards at a rock concert, parking attendants with new punitive powers (click here for The Times' man's take on this), or the police. Don't those shiny buttons and those epaulettes, along with their peaked hats, go to their heads just a little bit more than they should?

I don't want to get into a Japanese police bashing thing here (they've always been great with me!), but a couple of disturbing articles caught my eye in the news about recent police (in)activity. The first, from the other correspondent of The Times, is the tale of an unsolved (a rarity in Japan ... but this rarity is not necessarily something to gloat about) crime. Knocking on 15 years ago, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses was murdered. The statute of limitations in Japan is 15 years. Read here for one or two unpleasant nuances in the police records of this case that suggest the murderer can't have been Japanese.

The second is the case of a Hiroshima bar owner, of Peruvian descent, subjected to incarceration and a grilling over a number of days. You can read his story here. When I read this, visions of Haruki Murakami's interrogation scene in Dance, Dance, Dance popped into my head. The two cops, Bookish and Fisherman, try to force an admission of guilt and a signature out of the hero. Scenes like this are why Amnesty is so worried about Japan's high crime clear-up rate.