Tokyo is All Fuzz-y
There sure are a lot of policemen around Tokyo these days. I have been used to seeing them every morning in Shibuya etc., but there was even one in my little local train station this morning, monitoring commuters. Are they looking out for G8 Summit terrorists or is there some other threat that I should know about?
July 2, 2008 at 11:28 am
Summit. Expect them to go away after the 10th.
You may also have noticed your garbage cans are missing.
July 2, 2008 at 11:30 am
There are garbage cans in Tokyo???
July 2, 2008 at 12:03 pm
In the stations, yes!
July 2, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I asked a cop on the street yesterday and he said that it was inded because of the G8 stuffs.
July 2, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Or maybe they’re just keeping an eye out on you internet otaku types.
Should read: “There are garbage cans in any Japanese metropolitan areas?”
Well, aside from convenience stores and train stations, which seem to be the government’s one concession to sanity. And there’s that one in Sannomiya in Kobe that is always overflowing… But keep in mind that we’re all safer for it. It’s not as if terrorists are clever enough to develop an explosive device that could fit into the recycling bins next to every vending machine in the nation.
Ideally people wouldn’t be creating so much garbage, but when you’re in the land of individually wrapped everything it’s hard to avoid.
July 2, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Garbage can was removed from many “private”line,
using anti-terrorist cause.For it gives additional cost for the company to maintain and you will have homeless people coming in to look for the dumped magazines.
July 2, 2008 at 3:03 pm
There is this one dude who religiously steals the magazines from my station and I hate his guts. He has some kind of mechanical magazine-grabbing stick for the task. Still, throwing out my newspaper at the station means I dont have to deal with it at home, so I hope they’ll bring them back after the “heightened alert period” ends on the 10th.
July 2, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Look, if terrorists are going to bomb this city, then they had damn well better pay 300 yen to store the bomb in a coin locker, thank-you-very-much.
July 3, 2008 at 9:27 am
Adamu, why the hate? Does he steal magazines from the newsstand?
July 4, 2008 at 1:18 am
Yeah dude, why be such a hater? He snaking your bathroom material? Just kidding.
Giant G8 warning posters all over the Namboku & Hanzomon lines today in both English & Japanese.
July 4, 2008 at 11:53 pm
G8 or no, it seems to be something of a trend. You should try London if you think Tokyo is bad- on my way to work the other day i counted a record 41 police officers, split between two fifteen minute walks, from my house to the station and then the station to work.
They’re there to “make us feel safer” apparently, but after being one of 20,000-odd people randomly stopped and searched in London over the last two months (with a 4% catch rate) in a massive abuse of anti-terror laws, it just makes me feel like I’m living in a police state. Yes, you might be a tax paying civil servant working in whitehall, but you’re wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag so you must be a knife wielding hoodlum.
Can’t wait to emigrate…
July 5, 2008 at 12:33 am
It’s not just Tokyo, apparently. I snapped this photo today in Osaka. I should have taken some wider shots so you could tell that the signs were just taped over the openings in the garbage cans (and that all the bins were taped together for some reason), but I didn’t want to be spirited away to whatever the Japanese equivalent of Guantanamo is.
It’s wonderful how they mention right on the sign that the summit is in Hokkaido, some 700 miles away.
July 7, 2008 at 12:52 pm
Let me just complain again that there is a giant picture of a naked man on your front page. Theres no way I can check this site at work if youre going to do that to me.
July 7, 2008 at 1:04 pm
I’m not responsible.
July 7, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I’ve seen them a lot in Osaka, too – hanging around the shotengai and the train stations. I was thinking it was either about the G8 or in reaction to the stabbings in Tokyo. They stand on metal stools in the stations with their arms behind their backs, which I think kind of undermines their security efforts but I don’t pretend to know anything about the way this country works.
July 8, 2008 at 11:36 am
Yesterday I littered for the first time in Tokyo because they TAPED UP the can disposal.
July 8, 2008 at 11:49 am
They got rid of every trash can in the city after the Aum attacks, too. Kind of a pain. I’m up in Toyako (well, Rusutsu) right now and I can tell you that there are far more police and far fewer trash cans than in any of the cities mentioned so far.