Stopped by the gaijin police!

Lesson learnt: When in a foreign country ALWAYS carry your passport or equivalent. Ok, everyone already knew that, but the lesson was reinforced for me. I guess I think of my passport/gaijin (alien) card the same way I think of my drivers licence - it's always a good idea to carry it, but..

While on my way home from work with Cheng (JET who lives next door) 2 guys asked us to wait a minute in Japanese (yes - my Japanese is good enough to understand this!). My first thought was that they wanted me to take a photo of them (we were standing underneath a castle!) as one of them started getting something out which could've been a camera. But no, it was a police badge! He then asked if we could talk for a few minutes. He said it was their job to investigate foreigners.

They were both quite nice and even had a sense of humour (I imagine that this would have changed very quickly if I had not produced my gaijin card!), and once they realised that my Japanese was limited to understanding "please wait" spoke very good English!

We sat down, gave them our gaijin cards and they proceeded to copy down all the info. They also asked lots of questions:

The usual questions: Why are you in Japan? How long have you been here? Where are you working? Where are you coming from now? Where are you going now?

Complicated questions that required long explanations: Why are you here if your workplace is at X and your home is at Y? (A completely different direction!) (Yes, but we are employed by the board of education and had a work meeting in this suburb...)

And some not so expected questions - Do you love Japan? Do you speak English at these meetings? (They also seemed a bit surprised that Cheng was Australian even though he looks Asian. Asked him a few questions about that!).

Then they took down out phone numbers. Incidentally I feel really silly telling people that I forget my phone number and because I don't have a mobile phone (yet) it's not even in there! Fortunately Cheng remembers my phone number! (Might have to put a copy in my purse).

While this probably took about 15 minutes and was quite painless, it did reinforce the importance of always have appropriate ID. I always carry it.. but I might not think to take it if I was just going for a walk. I will now.