Posts Tagged ‘customs’

Customs officers punished for planting drugs in passengers’ luggage

Following an investigation into the unorthodox methods used by Japanese customs officials to train their sniffer dogs, it has been revealed that illegal substances have been planted on at least 160 innocent passengers in the past.

In an official press statement Tokyo Customs spokesman Kazutoshi Takahashi said that customs officials have been spiking customers bags since September of last year and that “The three officers apologised and explained that they did it in an effort to boost the dogs’ performance”. “We are deeply sorry that such acts have happened”.

In May this year the practice of deliberately planting illegal substances into passengers bags was exposed when four ounces of cannabis resin were placed inside the luggage of a traveler from Hong Kong. The resin and its unwitting custodian were then “lost”.

All 124 grams were recovered in a Tokyo hotel the following week and the customs officials have been disciplined by their superiors. The officer responsible for losing the hash has been suspended for three months while two other have had 10% salary cuts for three months.

This disciplinary action falls far short of the sentence the officers in question would have received if they had been convicted of distributing illegal substances by Japanese police. A conviction of drug dealing in Japan is notoriously harsh, but would have seemed like a walk in the park compared to their victim’s potential situation.

If the innocent passenger had returned to Hong Kong, or indeed mainland China he could have faced a police force known to use the death penalty to enforce its drug laws.

This series of events has demonstrated no small amount of professional neglect and incompetence on the part of Narita airport staff, but has also shown how easily one customs official can get his hands on significant quantities of illegal substances. Apparently if asked what he was planning to do with it, he either lied or was allowed to carry out his experiment with his superior’s consent. Either way, a rather large hole in internal security has reared its head.

No disciplinary measures have been announced for the dog.

Japanese Business Card Etiquette

From an instructional DVD on how to annoy and anger people:

[via Yongfook]

Japanese Apology

You might know that school girl uniforms and goshi goshi towels are Japanese cultural treasures, but what about the dogeza? The same TV program demonstrated the power of this Japanese technique of bowing in apology by flying comedian Tetsuro Degawa to America and putting him in situations where his only defenses were broken English and the dogeza.

First we have him apologizing for breaking the window of a house:

[The narrator claims they got prior permission from the American man's wife to break the window, but it's pretty hard to watch the video and not get the sense that everything was staged and all the people are actors.]

Next we have Testuro walk out of the shower to find a American woman in his bed. She has called her boyfriend and told him that a half-naked intruder is in her hotel room. Watch him cower in fear before the big angry guy in a football jersey:

Finally, having proven that a Japanese man can use the dogeza technique to apologize his way out of two sticky situations, the show has an American man try it out. Testuro finds an American guy who will stay out late drinking and buying video games so he can attempt a dogeza on his furious wife:

Based on these three situations the show concludes that the dogeza is indeed a Japanese treasure!

What do you think? would this actually work in America?

Update: Does this description of Junichiro Koizumi joking with the G8 leaders around sound like a dogeza to you?

….Jacques Chirac, a well-known Japanophile, spoke of the different ways of bowing in Japan depending on who one is facing. Koizumi then came up in front of Bush and said the way to bow before you is this, and fell to both his knees and prostrated himself.