Day 11 in Japan: Police



Penny and I are seasoned police station visitors. In China we filled out forms in triplicate, or at least a polite officer of the Foreigners' Police Force in Xian interrogated us, wrote a report and gave us a faint second carbon of the ideogram rich document. A Dublin encounter was unmemorably benign. Our Sicilian experience was nothing short of exhilarating. When one of my sons was robbed at knife point on a school excursion in Sydney about fifteen years ago, we spent four or five excruciatingly boring and completely hours in two police stations, which I suspect were inflicted on us as punishment for reporting the crime.

The big event today (that is to say, a month ago today) was our visit to a Nara police station to report the loss of Penny's phone. We both thought that if we could have turned up at the place where we had lunch yesterday they would have held onto it for us and would be delighted to hand it over. But it was Monday and the place was shut, so there was nothing for it but to report it to the police for insurance purposes.

We had a little trouble finding the station. We walked into a large building that we thought was it, but soon realised we'd misread the map (is anyone surprised?). Instead of going back out into the street and trying again, we decided to ask for help. We walked into an office that looked fairly open to the passing public and asked a young man at the counter if he spoke English. He didn't. He disappeared and came back with a slightly senior woman who spoke it a little. 'We are looking for the police station,' I said, fully expecting her to point us in the general direction and wave us a cheerful goodbye. 'Why?' she asked, and it was a good 15 minutes, possibly 30, and several phone calls before we left that office, having explained our situation to a number of people, and received invariably sympathetic responses, but no indication of where the police station was.

Eventually, as politely as we could, we extricated ourselves, went back to the street, crossed a car park and walked into the next building we saw, which had big letters all over it in English: Nara Police Station.

But oh no! As we walked into the foyer, there was no mistaking the look of total panic on the young woman at the reception desk: 'Oh God! Foreigners! They're coming this way! Please don't let them talk to me!' She told us politely that she spoke very little English. We told her we'd lost a mobile phone. She asked us to wait (in an impeccably grammatical sentence), and made a brief phone call. Five minutes later, we were about to give up altogether and made to leave. 'No no!' she said. 'Please remain here a little longer.' She made another phone call, and a man in plain clothes appeared almost immediately: 'We know many things, but very little English,' he said wryly. 'Please wait.'

It turned out that the receptionist had understood our initial explanation of our situation correctly and communicated it to everyone who now appeared on the scene -- and there were several. The man with the wry smile was soon joined by a gangly young man in uniform who spoke good English, a quietly efficient woman who took notes of everything we said -- that is, we spoke in English, she wrote things down in Japanese and asked pertinent questions in English. I relaxed about being understood at the point when I couldn't find my phone and said, 'Oh no, I've lost mine now!' and the tall young man, said, 'You're kidding, right!' It turned out he had spent a year in Perth studying English. Two or three other people in uniform turned up and stood around looking attentive, 20 percent concerned and 80 percent amused by the show.

We gave the addresses and phone numbers of everywhere we planned to be for the next two weeks. Unlike the police we've encountered anywhere else in the world, these fully expected the phone to be handed in. Their confidence, and the fact it didn't have a hole through which a little dangly thing could be attached, which would surely have made the phone pretty unattractive to almost anyone in Japan, mad me think they were probably right. All the same, we asked for a copy of the police report for the insurance company just in case the phone didn't turn up. 'We do not give copies of our reports to the public,' said the wry man, clearly the most senior person present. But he went away and five minutes later came back with the number that would be assigned to the report.

I'd like to say we did get the phone back, but sadly that was not to be, even though I was fully expecting a phone call from Nara until our very last day in Japan.

That night, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant that advertised live jazz. But the jazz had been the week before, and instead we had a pleasant meal of spaghetti accompanied by cool 60s jazz from a vinyl record, one of the thousands from the walls of the restaurant.

Posted: Thu - September 25, 2008 at 10:44 PM           |

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