Jogging

I just got back from a quick jog. It's hard to sleep lately, maybe because of the heat, I don't know, but I figured exercise might be better than booze. Besides I like jogging and it's too damn hot to jog during the day (34C, strong sun and humid.) Lately I've been jogging about 2x a week around 11pm.

Tonight I set out at a little after midnight and took a dfferent route. On my way home I took off my shirt. After I passed my house I continued walking for a while to cool down.

As I went around the bend, two police cars were creeping along towards me.

okay, gaijin with a shirt off running around at midnight. Looks funny I guess. I can kinda see that. But not funny enough to call the cops.

I kept walking at the same pace, and as each car crept by the police inside checked me out and talked into their collar mounted radios. I looked back at them as one would.

They kept moving, so did I. After 2 more minutes of walking I was ready to head home. On my way home I passed them at the same spot near my house. One cop put down the window and asked me if I had been at the youth hostel tonight. I said no, I live around here. People in Japan get naked in hot springs but don't take their shirts off in public. Usually I wouldn't out of courtesy but it's soooo hot and no one is around. So it was probably bad form of me to stand there addressing a cop with my hairy chest dripping sweat. (I promise to upload a photo later)

So the cop said "Just taking a walk?" he was very polite and didn't seem to be harassing me at all.

"Well, jogging," I said, pumping my arms and showing my very new, very flashy and highly reflective shoes not to be used for effective sneaking around.

"Okay, goodnight then," he said and drove away.


(<--- My running shoes. See all the 3M reflective stripes? Standard issue for ninjas and axe murderers.)

The cops were fine but as I walked home I thought about it. My new route was sorta near the Youth Hostel. If my neighborhood were the continental US and my house was NYC and the hostel was in California, well I jogged to the Mississippi and back instead of towards Florida like I usually do. So if you're really looking for a landmark, yeah I was kinda that way. Sorry for the bad explanation, it's late.

Like I said, the cops didn't bother me. They have a job to do and they were polite. But though I can't prove it, unless there was a break-in at the Youth Hostel that will appear in tomorrow's paper, odds are pretty good someone driving in my neighborhood called in a crazed foreign guy running around and the cops knew straight which house to go to. The youth hostel is a couple of KM away through several twisty streets and stoplights, but the squad cars appeared in front of my house pretty fast. What also bothers me is not only that someone would have called me in, but that there are plenty of other things wrong in my neighborhood, like little teenage motorcycle gangs, that I never see cops respond to. I was ready to give them shit about that if they hassled me. I pay taxes too and even in Japan there's nothing illegal about walking around with one's shirt off. The cops came around to my house so fast. I've had this kind of thing happen before. In this case, the cops probably figured I was the guy they got a call about, realized I'm just someone jogging, problem solved, and went back to the office.

This isn't supposed to be a blog about "Those zany/ mysterious/ impenetrable Japanese and everything that's odd about their country." It's not meant to describe all the things Japanese people do that are different from the way Americans do. It's meant to record Japanese attitudes in the year 2005. So I don't plan on "Japan bashing," not even in this post, but for the record, I would wager that people living in Kochi in the year 2005 find a foreigner running around in running gear and reflective jogging shoes on a hot summer night threatening enough to call the police and warrant an immediate dispatch of 2 squad cars. That is how some people think. But like I said, the cops were cool about it.