- 12 Oct 2004
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Petaris said:It is far more likely that the officer would stop you and ask you to go through the correct gate. We are talking about Japan after all, not Chicago.
Seriously.
misternada said:Well, let's say you exit by the wrong gate a Shinagawa shinkansen station, the cop on duty will run after you, you'd better run quick because if he catches you he will beat you with his stick ...
Be honest with me. Have you ever seen a Japanese police officer randomly beat a foreigner for a "crime" as insignificant as accidentally going through the wrong train gate? Or how about for any other reason?
As Petaris says, I would suspect a police officer in the US exercising violence (especially against a minority) is a scenario several hundred thousand times more likely than that of a Japanese police officer just laying into a random white dude.
And if you did go out the wrong gate (I would hope by accident and not intentionally), that would mean you didn't pay your fare and, most likely, the gate is beeping loudly, so the suitable response is to apologize and ask where the right gate is, not to run away, for heaven's sake.
No offense, but I would hate to live in your Japan—a joyless world where no one smiles (it's considered "aggressive", after all), people go around all day staring at the ground and doing their best to avoid all social interactions until the day they die and leave "nothing behind", and draconian, violent police officers constantly have their eyes peeled for foreigners committing even the slightest offense so they can mercilessly chase them down and brutally abuse them.
Fortunately, the Japan I live in, at least, is nothing like that.
If your post was supposed to be an attempt at humor, I apologize. I just don't really find it funny. There are people on this forum who have never been to Japan, and who have a genuine interest in the country and culture. There's nothing wrong with being critical of certain parts of Japan and Japanese culture or describing the less pleasant parts of living here (certainly, neither I nor anyone else is trying to say that it's all sunshine and cherry blossoms all the time), but would it hurt to provide a more nuanced perspective rather than resorting to this sort of exaggerated (and, one might argue, outright false and misleading) sensationalism?
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