ninme

The Times - It’s a riot in the Japanese police… if only
Notebook: The closest you get to a mob in Tokyo is sale time at Prada, by Richard Lloyd Parry

There are few more forlorn and pointless occupations in the world than that of the Japanese riot police. Consider their situation - plucked from the ranks for their intelligence and fitness, trained over several years in marksmanship, crowd control and the most lethal of the martial arts, then set loose in a country with the same level of civil unrest as Legoland.

Forty years ago Tokyo was a place of crunchy anti-American protests; these days the closest you get to a rampaging mob in Tokyo is sale time at Prada. “Japanese riot policeman” is close to being a contradiction in terms, like Welsh humorist or Scottish gourmet. So it seems only fair that, every now and then, Japan’s finest are allowed out of their box.

So they were last week, at the G8 summit on the northern island of Hokkaido. On the face of it, this was an opportunity for the world’s most powerful leaders to come together to discuss weighty issues of global import. In fact, it was a poorly disguised excuse for rozzers from all over Japan to unite for the riot policing equivalent of a three-day bender.

The leaders of the US, Britain, Germany and Russia all in one room are certainly a succulent terrorist target. The Japanese strategy was to locate the room on top of a mountain and seal it off for 30 miles in every direction. Filling the void, in patrol cars, buses and on foot, equipped with body armour, riot shields, perspex shields, guns and smiles, were 20,000 police.

The scene on the road to the media centre was like one of those post-holocaust scenarios when the human beings have died out, bequeathing the Earth to the cockroaches - except that these cockroaches were blue, life-size and carrying truncheons. Every hundred yards, for an hour-long drive, was a Plod standing on an almost empty road, with literally nothing to do.

<– me