The Fuzz

The Japanese establishment is especially proud of their incredibly safe and secure society, a fact that I have come to enjoy and get very used to. There is no need to worry about locking many things here (although everyone does, religiously), the streets – nearly any street – is safe for a young woman to walk alone at any hour, there is homeless but you don’t see them and they certainly don’t bother you for change or a treat for their dog. I will have a hard time adjusting to keeping track of my wallet full of cash during a night at the pub or making sure not to leave my laptop unattended in a public place once I return home.

In about 1 week, Hokkaido will host the 2008 G8 summit at a Lake Toya. The Japanese establishment is also very proud of their incredibly non-confrontational society. Of course, hosting the G8 summit brings with it a fair share of controversy and host countries are always the launching point for all sorts of protest and debate over the summit. Japan, however, has decided that they will absolutely not allow such bad behaviour while they are hosting important guests (and international press) who might not believe their country is one that follows all the rules without question and never has any crime. They intend to implement this no-protesting hooliganism strategy by laying waste to any progress in the way of racism and human rights.
For starters, they have spent more money on security for this event than any other country has in the past (again – this in a country where I could have stolen 72 cars by now and two of them were police cars). They have enlisted additional police forces here in Hokkaido, bringing cops from every corner of Japan. They are preventing any police currently working in the southern Hokkaido area from taking even one day of holiday during the month before and the month after the event. We just drove through the region of the summit on our way to field work and there were police inspection points at every highway intersection for miles around the summit location. The police were very serious about their work and were sure to stop our vehicle and take a peek in all the windows, who wouldn’t with a dangerous looking white woman in the front seat!

Here is a picture (sorry - it is a terrible photo - of one of the roadblocks).


One would assume that the natural beauty of the forest surrounding Lake Toya factored largely in the decision to host the event there. Well, security has also trumped that one! They have cut a swath of old-growth forest in a belt around the hotel where the delegates will be staying in order to ensure that no “bad people” can sneak in under a cover of beautiful pristine national park forest.
One of the excursions planned for the event will involve the delegates going from the hotel to a nearby attraction. It seems that the current road connecting these two locations wasn’t secure enough so they built a whole new “secure” roadway. It so happens that this road passes through and destroys a long-term forest research plot used by one of the labs in my faculty. Certainly, a smoother and less noisy car ride for Bush and his cronies is worth years of carefully planned and ecologically relevant research down the drain.

Others foreigners have told me that they have had some difficult times lately with random police asking to inspect their backpacks and ruthless checks of foreigners (even those of us who are living and working here) at airports and train stations. We are on our way to Portugal this weekend for a symposium on larval biology and ecology and as expected, we had more fun with the fuzz at the airport. Here is a security guard on a stepladder carefully watching the airport trainstation traffic.