Japan has a problem with fraudsters calling up old people and convincing them to wire money, which is instant and barely reversible here. Tokyo Metro Police are therefore calling up every old person in Tokyo and offering to do an on-site visit and change their phone settings. https://t.co/kI3t00uugo
“We will humbly ask you to change the number of rings before a call goes to voice mail. Remember, if you don’t answer the phone, you can’t be victimized by fraud! Thank you for your cooperation.” (Freehand translation.)
This is Serious Business; the police report somewhere north of $50 million in damages in Tokyo.
Someone on Twitter once replied to one of my Japanecdotes with “Japan seems to be good at taking things that don’t scale and scaling them anyhow” so let me extend this with another example of bureaucracy mobilized in a novel fashion:
A few hours after the 9/11 attacks the US Embassy in Tokyo made formal requests to their counterparts in Japan for assistance w/r/t securing Americans in Japan, of which there are about 100k at any moment. They were beaten to the punch by someone in the Kyoto Prefectural Police.
Acting on the hunch that someone was trying to hurt Americans and not sure of who they might try to hit in Kyoto, the prefectural police had a simple solution: Put a guard on the American. Every American. In the middle of the night.
Now this might seem non-trivial but you are not thinking through this like a Japanese bureaucrat, who knows that someone has a list of all the hotels in the city and every ward office has a list of foreign residents, so it’s just a matter of mobilizing a few thousand people.
Which they did, expeditiously. Source: the head of an American educational institution in Kyoto, who was awakened at first light by a police captain apologizing for being only able to spare two dozen officers in riot gear for his school.
(I attended the same institution the following year, when memories were quite fresh. Suffice it to say that many, many encounters with the Japanese police over the years have yet to expend their accumulated karma with me, despite the best efforts of many.)
Worth mentioning: “Was that just for show?” I don’t know who ordered it but, if I’m going by the probable motivations of behavior within a Japanese organization: very little perceived risk but non-zero, and the strength of signaling portion of the response was intended and real.
