My Experience With the Japanese Justice System

I'm off for like three weeks, so I'm posting now. Here's the story!

So this one time, my buddies Brian and Sanaa and I were walking down the street in a pretty hoppin' part of Kyoto. We had just split off from a larger group, 'cause the rest of them wanted to go home like a bunch of early-bailing-out ninnies. Turns out they made the right decision, as things went strangely awry that night...

Some background is needed here. Bicycles are quite popular in Kyoto. I ride one myself. People ride their bikes everywhere, but it's illegal to park said bikes in all but a few select locations. As a result, you see a ton of illegally parked bikes. Cops occasionally ticket them (which is possible because they all have to be registered) or just load them onto a truck and haul them away. Despite this, people aren't terribly afraid to leave their bikes any old where.

So we're walking, right? We see a huge collection of bicycles illegally parked in the same area. Not an uncommon thing. What was uncommonly funny about it, however, was that there was actually a "No Bicycles" sign in that spot with... wait for it... a bicycle leaning against it. Hilarious, right? Because it was hilarious, I took a picture of it. Right after I took the picture, two women who had been sitting behind the sign jumped up and looked concerned. "Hey, I think they think I just took a picture of them," I said to my friends. But, I figured, since I hadn't taken a picture of them, everything would be fine. On we walked.

So two blocks down and fifteen to twenty minutes later, the three of us are sitting in a Starbucks enjoying beverages and talking about Philosophy of Mind (really). One of the Starbucks employees approaches us and asks a question in Japanese. She asks"did you take a picture," but, thanks to the multi-functionality of Japanese grammatical forms, I mistakenly thought that she had either asked "were you able to take a picture" or "was a picture taken." Confused, I answered "no." With me still confused, Brian asks, "do you think maybe those women are looking for us?" Sanaa and I guffaw at the silliness of the suggestion.

So about five minutes later, the two women come in with two or three cops. As it turns out, taking pictures of people without their permission is super-bad, and if you're a big scary foreigner like me, people will find a police officer and hunt you down for it. So, long story relatively short, we spend about 25 minutes being questioned by police in the Starbucks, other patrons become concerned and leave, the police look through our cameras/phones for pictures of the women (hint: there weren't any) and take down all our passport/college/whatever info they can get.

By the end of the interrogation, the Starbucks is closed, there are about six cops there, and the two women are still looking like I tried to rape them or something. Wondering why we're still here, I make eye contact with one of the officers and ask "is there a problem?" He shakes his head "no" reassuringly, and a few minutes later the women and police officers file out without another word.

So it turned out alright. No real trouble ever occurred. But this was one case where all is not well that ends well. First of all, as we've learned since then, the officers' taking our information was actually illegal. Beyond that, though, I think we were treated pretty poorly. No, the officers and the women weren't directly rude to us, but they did make a scene in the Starbucks, hold us for about a half hour, repeatedly explain to us that we can't take pictures of people without their permission despite having (inappropriately) looked through our cameras and seen that we didn't, then walk out without so much as an apology or an explicit reassurance that we weren't in trouble. From the look on their faces, I'd say the women still weren't convinced that we hadn't taken any pictures of them; they looked like they thought we had gotten away with it. Then, as we made our way outside (the Starbucks employee shooed us out), we saw two of the officers bowing ever-so-politely to the two women. Seriously, did they just treat us that way because we were foreigners?

One small plus: Sanaa's host mother, enraged by the whole series of events, later called the police station and got an apology out of them, as well as a guarantee that we weren't in any trouble.

Other small plus: Sanaa's host sister is pretty convinced that the reason the number of cops kept increasing as we sat there was that I'm large and intimidating. Just call me Godzilla.