Tokyo’s Kinder, Gentler Police Force

TOKYO —  During his 15 years as a Tokyo police officer, Tadashi Kohara has never drawn his gun.

In fact, he has used physical force in making an arrest only once: He pinned down a drunken man who had punched him.

Like most Japanese police officers, Kohara, a chubby 34-year-old who looks more like Dilbert than Dirty Harry, rarely encounters the kind of violent crime that his American counterparts risk their lives fighting.

Most calls to 110--Japan’s equivalent of 911--involve incidents of shoplifting, traffic accidents, the occasional brawl or a mouse setting off an office alarm.

That means Kohara and other police officers on the street are seen more as community helpers than as crime fighters. And that is becoming the focus of criticism from a public increasingly worried about crime.

“Officers are kind,” said Masako Akazawa, who runs a dry-cleaning shop. “But they don’t do a good job of preventing crime.”

Japan’s crime rate is low when compared with the crime rates of many industrial countries, but there is public unease that serious crime may be on the rise, mostly because of the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway two years ago that killed 12 people and sickened more than 5,000.

Government figures show 2.43 million crimes were reported in Japan in 1995, about 9% more than five years earlier. But in the area of some violent crimes, there were fewer in 1995 than there were nine years earlier. In 1995, there were 1,281 murders, which was 43 more than in 1990 but 395 less than in 1986, and the number of assaults--10,808 in 1986--fell to 6,190.

Meanwhile, thefts steadily rose over the same period to 1.57 million in 1995.

Yoshihide Kuroki, an official at the National Police Agency, contends the subway attack was an extreme crime that is unlikely to happen again. But he concedes his officers need to be reminded not to be too laid-back.

“Japan is too peaceful,” Kuroki said. “What we stress is to be on guard and dodge the sudden attack.”

Changing the mellow image may take some work. Motorcycle gangs now speed through residential areas, right past police officers, breaking every traffic rule in the book, knowing they won’t get stopped.

“We could catch them if we wanted to,” Officer Norio Oshima said. “But they would get hurt and we would get hurt.”

Indeed, police on the beat devote little time to dealing with actual crime.

One recent evening on duty, Kohara played with a lost 3-year-old boy until his mother showed up. Later, he asked a homeless man to move from an underground passageway.

Kohara spent most of his time giving directions to dozens of pedestrians who were searching for theaters, banks, offices and stores in Tokyo, a maze of streets with a chaotic address system.

One woman going to a French restaurant even stopped him to ask about proper dining etiquette. Another man complained about a video game in an arcade that he kept losing at.

“It’s worth it,” Kohara said. “Especially if that person stops to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

Japanese police are credited with using “community policing”--keeping down crime by befriending the people in the neighborhood--long before American law enforcement caught on to the idea.

In Tokyo, most officers are assigned to one of 1,200 neighborhood police booths--each called a koban--that are the backbone of Japan’s police patrols. Each koban is equipped with a tiny kitchen and a sleeping area so officers can catnap on a futon.

In all, 24 officers are assigned to the Shibuya koban, which sits outside the Shibuya train station and is responsible for an area roughly three-quarters of a mile long and one-third of a mile wide. About 4,000 homes and 400 businesses fall inside the koban’s area.

There are few complaints about excessive use of force by Japanese police. Officers are trained not to shoot unless they have been stabbed several times, and strict gun-control laws mean they run into few suspects who are carrying guns.

Nevertheless, human-rights groups have accused the police of abusing the rights of some suspects in custody.

Like Americans, Japanese citizens have the constitutional right to remain silent at the time of police questioning, but unlike their American counterparts, Japanese police are not required to inform crime suspects of those rights.

And detectives can hold a suspect for questioning without a lawyer for weeks, sometimes for months. That can result in forced, false confessions, attorney Yuichi Kaido said.

“The Japanese police may not be as violent as the American police, but they can carry out long, exhausting interrogations in ways that don’t leave visible scars,” Kaido said.