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A man (face obscured for privacy) is randomly stopped and searched by a policeman outside Yotsuya Station I was witness a couple of days ago to a?stop and frisk?(shokumu shitsumon) incident by the Japanese police outside Yotsuya Station. It was about 1:30 pm on a bright sunny day in Yotsuya - a district that, of generally trouble-free Tokyo, has to be one of the metropolis's least troubled areas.

I was waiting for the traffic lights to cross the road, and saw most of it. The policeman (as a matter of course armed with a pistol) was polite but clearly insistent, and spent the best part of at least a minute looking and feeling inside the passerby's bag, asking him questions all the while.

If the man being search fit some kind of profile, then it was a very subtley designed profile, because he was by no means your textbook criminal looking type. In fact, he positively radiated decency in his demeanor, was at least equally polite as the policeman searching him, and very cooperative.
However the clear insistence and obtrusiveness of what was going on - and in a setting, right outside a railway station gate, that could hardly be more public - made the almost excessive politeness on both their parts awkward and difficult to watch.

Policeman patting down bystander as part of random check, Yotsuya, TokyoJudging by the faces of a couple of people near the station entrance observing what was going on, the actions of the policeman were not justified. If I had s...