Stop! Police!

With the shrill screech of a whistle, a pleasant afternoon outing came to a halt and ended in the Harajuku police station. It's not as bad as my other police stories, if you've heard them :-) We were coming back by scooter from a walk in Shinjuku-gyoen and were en route to our favourite creperie for a dessert and coffee. S had missed a sign, made an illegal right turn, and got about 50 meters before the whistle blew. We were close to getting off with a short lecture and a warning, until they saw exactly what we didn't want them to see-- the expired date on S' Japanese driver's license.

In truth, we've known for a while that it's been expired. S had received a letter back in June but waited for me to get back to Tokyo to read it for him. After that, the letter and instructions ended up either in the rubbish or somewhere else equally useless. We never found it, and therefore, S never went to get his license renewed.

Fortunately, the Japanese police are prone to believing that foreigners who don't speak or read Japanese are just as useless as the lost letter, so it was pretty easy to convince them of S' mistake. "It's heisei year 18!? That means 2006?! Ohhhhhh.... I'm so sorry, we didn't know.....!" But still, we had to go to the police station so they could check S' records and make sure we understood the gravity of our situation. Once inside the station, it took not one, not two, but EIGHT policemen and TWO hours to figure out whether or not S was driving illegally or whether his French license could still be valid for driving. It was surely the case of the week. Funny to think why there are so many policemen in Japan and no crime... but I no longer have to wonder what they do. It's obvious that the case of the gaijin without proper license is a big one! In the end, the verdict was: "Yes, he was driving illegally, but he is an illiterate foreigner and therefore too stupid to understand the superior nature of Japanese law. Poor guy. (And poor girl for having to come here and interpret our language for him!)"

Anyway, his punishment was to sign an apology letter saying that he was sorry for disobeying the law and that he would not do it again. And then we had to figure out how to get home, considering S could no longer illegally drive his scooter. After much deliberation, it was determined that one policeman would drive his scooter to our neighborhood, and two other policemen would drive us there to meet him, and we would push the scooter home from there. And that's exactly how our police story ended.

I must say, the Japanese police could not really have been any more pleasant to us. Considering S was in the wrong for driving without his license, we did not get fined, charged, or accused. An apology, a few bows, and some polite language on my part, and we were let off the hook. No doubt an experience that would only happen in Japan. All I have to say is that S was lucky to have me as his lawyer, with the plead of "stupid foreigner!"