overthetwelve comments

Elephants are majestic.

a payment of 100,000 yen to all citizens.

Only citizens?

Synthetic pot, also known as "spice" or K2 has similar properties as the "bath salts" that caused a man to eat another man's face off back in 2012. These hallucinogenic herbs are quite different from marijuana and can cause dangerous health effects like psychotic episodes and seizures.

The Nissan 'Moco' and Daihatsu 'Esse' are my favorites. Doesn't 'moco' mean booger in Spanish? Also, 'esse' is a Spanish slang term that usually means 'bro' or 'man' or 'dude'. Who comes up with these? Can you imagine if Ford came out with a new model and called it 'Hanakuso'?

A few years ago, I was accosted by a plainclothes officer at Tachikawa Station. I was just about to exit the station when he came up to me with a big grin on his face. He asked me where I was from. I thought he was just some guy who wanted to practice his English. I was on my way home from work after a busy day, so I wasn't in the mood to entertain him and politely told him I was in a hurry. At this point, he became aggressive toward me. He started asking me where I was going and why I didn't want to talk to him. I started to think he was a lunatic and was beginning to worry about my safety. He backed me up against a wall and had a crazy look in his eyes. Before I knew it, three other guys had joined him and they were all surrounding me. As they weren't wearing uniforms, I didn't know what to think. I thought they might just be out to harass any random foreigner they saw. They had cornered me against a low wall and I feared they might push me over and onto the escalator below. Finally, they told me they were police officers. I asked them to show me some proof, and they flashed their badges at me. They did it so quickly and inconspicuously that I didn't have time to discern whether they were real or had been purchased at Don Quixote. In all honesty, I did not think these guys were police officers. Both of my parents are police officers, and so I already had preconceived ideas about how real police officers should behave. These guys were so riled up and had so much adrenaline flowing through them that I thought they might be high on something. I told them that this whole situation was strange, and the first guy gets in my face and says, "You think I'm strange?! You think I'm strange?!" Not knowing what to do, I actually screamed for help. (Needless to say, no one was interested in getting involved.) So here I am, on my way home from work wearing a suit and tie and holding my business bag, surrounded by four guys wearing jeans and sweatshirts. They take my arm and start physically dragging me toward an unmarked door inside the station. I'm like, WTF! I ask a JR staff if these guys are really police officers, and he just looks at me, looks at the men and then turns away. So before I know it I'm being dragged into a corridor behind a big silver door inside the station. They ask me if I have a knife on me and I'm like, "Do I look like I have a knife on me?" So to make a long story short, they had apparently mistaken me for "some other dark-skinned guy."

So if I were to answer the question, "What do you think of Japanese police?" based on this experience alone, I would say they're incompetent and irrational. But the truth is I've met many police officers out here who were very kind and helpful so I won't make the same rash judgment on them that they made on me.