the cops here

I meant to post this a few days ago, on Sunday, but work called. . .
I was leaving my apartment building, heading out to get breakfast, when a police squad car pulled up beside me and one of the cops got out, smiling, “Sumimasen!”  He said sorry, but he wanted to see my ID.  I asked him if something had happened, and why he wanted to see it.  He said sorry, that they were looking for drug-users and asked me if I do drugs.  I said no, I don’t.  He asked again to see my ID.  I said that I was pretty sure it was illegal (fuhou, 不法 ) for him to ask me without a specific reason, and he said yes, and sorry, but could he see an ID?  I said again that I was pretty sure it was illegal, but he asked again to see an ID.  I let him see my ID card; he checked it out and asked if he could look through my wallet, which I permitted (saying once again that I was sure it was illegal for him to be doing this); he kept smiling and looked through it for signs of drugs or any other wrongdoing, returned it to me, said thank you, and he and his squad card were on their way.  I made it to the restaurant 15 minutes before they stopped serving breakfast.

Over the years, I’ve had a few encounters with the Japanese police.  One notable trait is how utterly polite most police officers are here.  It doesn’t seem to matter what they’re saying, but they’re cordial and almost subservient.  Of course, one could argue that a person in authority can act as subservient as s/he wants simply because s/he knows that s/he’s the one in power.  But anyway. . .I know some foreigners here who can’t stand the cops, but I don’t take great issue with how I’m treated by the police.  I find it annoying when they stop me for no reason to check my ID.  Actually, I shouldn’t say that there’s no reason.  The reason, at least sometimes, has been that I’m Chinese-American, but they don’t know the American part just by looking at me.  So they stop me, and when they see on my ID that I’m American, we’re usually done; they apologize and/or thank me for my cooperation, and I’m on my way.

So yeah, profiling isn’t a great controversy here.  There may be laws against it—I don’t know, honestly—but in any case this isn’t a very letter-of-the-law kind of country.  People don’t often sue for being approached, carded, and searched by the police.  I see good and bad in that, the good being that people don’t often game the system to extract a financial settlement with the police.  The bad is that individual rights are sometimes not given their due respect. . .I’ve been hearing stories from colleagues at work who say that the country’s changing, and they tell me stories about how (non-Japanese) Asians are more frequently being stopped and searched without cause.  I feel that it’s not hard to believe; once, when an officer stopped me on the sidewalk, he said that the police were looking for Asian (meaning Asian but not Japanese) people who might be stealing bicycles in the area.

In the end, for me it’s fairly easy to tolerate such mindsets mainly because the police are so damn polite.  Also, even if some of them are acting on prejudice and generalization, at least they don’t abuse me, and at least they’re constantly apologizing.  I suppose the politeness is the spoonful of sugar that M.Poppins once sang about.  I don't mean that my tolerance is the right way to go about it; maybe I'm supposed to draw a line and object.  I'm still trying to figure this one out.  But I wanted to make the observation that the way in which I'm asked to do things has had a pretty significant impact on my likelihood to comply.  A couple decades ago, one sleepy summer vacation day, I saw an episode of Oprah where a tabloid reporter on the show said that she felt she could ask any question of anyone, as long as she found the right way to ask it.

Funny, as I was typing this entry,  I recalled a former colleague (from Britain) telling me about his British friend who was so pissed off at the Japanese police that he had part of the Japanese Constitution ( the part that said it was illegal for police to ask for IDs without a specific reason) printed on his  shirt.  He said that if they ever asked for his ID, he’d sit on the sidewalk and refuse to provide it.  I don’t know how well that worked out for him.