This article is reproduced from the discontinued, but much loved Mainichi Waiwai column by Ryann Connell. Read more about this at the bottom of this article.
A chance encounter on a Tokyo street gave a spunky half-American model a chance to make sure the capital’s uncouth law enforcers copped a blast, according to Shukan Asahi (1/19).
DJ-cum-model Yurika Amari ended up giving some of the Metropolitan Police Department’s plods a lesson in good manners.
She was making up for some rough handling she received from the long arm of the law after they suspected she was up to no good apparently because her big bust and lanky looks made her stand out from the crowded streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district.
Amari, whose father is an American, was walking along the streets in late December when a couple of uniformed cops came up and grabbed her from behind. They whirled her around and demanded she tell them whether she was a foreigner and if she could speak Japanese.
One of the cops reached for Amari’s handbag. When she refused to give it to him, he snatched it away from her and began rifling through it. When the fuzz failed to find anything untoward, they began walking away, but Amari wasn’t letting them off so easily after what they’d just put her through. She asked their names and they simply flashed their police notebooks (the Japanese equivalent of a Western cop showing their badge) and sauntered off…
Amari filed a complaint with the MPD over the way the cops had handled her. She demanded a meeting with the officers who had accosted her and an apology. She ended up speaking to their boss, who refused to apologize for their behavior. With police refusing to express any regret, Amari asked for — and was given — the opportunity to educate the police on boorish behavior.
Tokyo’s cops acknowledged Amari taught them some lessons.
“Among the opinions she expressed were some that could be useful when it comes to questioning people in the future. She also works as a teacher at schools and places. We thought she may be able to provide us with some interesting views, so asked her to give a speech for us,” an MPD spokesman tells the Weekly.
Amari spoke for about 1 hour to around 80 police officers, most of them men in their 40s and 50s. She was pleased with the results.
“I used the experiences I’d been through to tell people about the best way to deal with women and advised them not to come up from behind people and grab them by the shoulders,” Amari tells Shukan Asahi. “I said everything I wanted to. There’s no bitterness left now.”
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(The Mainichi Waiwai column ran online from April 19, 2001 – June 21, 2008. It was a much loved form of entertainment amongst foreigner in and outside of Japan. To any reader it was obviously not serious news, but it was a set of articles that portrayed quite well how the Japanese tabloids actually write about their own country. In 2008, a small number of Japanese people bought it to the attention of rival news groups that Mainichi was running an anti-Japan column on its website. With the bad publicity, Mainichi was forced to shut the page down, and take punitive measures against the journalists that were working on it, claiming that it was receiving opinions that were critical of the column, such as “its contents are too vulgar” and “the stories could cause Japanese people to be misunderstood abroad”. A perfect example of how Japanese consider what they write in their own script to be an acceptable secret code, that the rest of the world cant understand. When that same tabloid rubbish gets inconveniently translated to English to make light of some aspects of the Japanese people, it gets canned. Stippy.com finds this unacceptable, and will reproduce as much of the Waiwai content as possible in order to bring it once again to our computer screens for a good laugh. Of course we claim no credit for this content, and attribute it to it’s writers who were former Mainichi employees. Waiwai in its true and glorious form has been discontinued, but it’s legacy will live on at stippy.com for all to enjoy.)