AkairoJhon

It is not against the law to run away from a policeman in Japan. If stopped on the street, a person can choose to ignore the police's questions, and the encounter is legally voluntary. That is the backdrop to a new children's game in Osaka. A group of kids walks up to a police box, shouts "Shorinji," the Japanese for Shaolin Temple, and runs away, with one of them filming it. The game has become known as "Shorinji racing." Running away is not the problem. Since September, the police have recorded around 280 such incidents and taken in some 50 kids who have taken part, the youngest aged seven. The problem is the reaction of the police. A policeman cannot know whether a shout or firecracker is a joke until he has reacted as if it were genuine. On November 4, four boys opened the sliding door of a police box, closed it, shouted the magic word and ran. A dashcam video showed several police cars arriving, and what looked like a forensic team turning up, too. The offense is wasting police work. The precedent was set by an incident in 2017. A YouTuber dropped a bag of white powder outside a police box in Fukui, picked it up again and ran, while his wife filmed him. It turned out to be sugar. The video got over a million views in the first week after it was uploaded. The court did not punish him for running. It punished him for the work. It added up the 28 police officers who spent three and a half hours chasing and then questioning him, declared it a waste of their time, and levied a fine of around $3,600. His lawyers argued that if wasting police time is a crime, then there would be no limit to the behavior that could be punished. The Supreme Court let the fine stand. On November 2, the Osaka police arrested an 18-year-old on the same charge. He ran accounts promoting the fad, the police say, and posted a message inviting people to an illegal bike run on October 17 and telling them to come with swords and firecrackers. The run never happened. He was arrested because the police had to make preparations and set up checkpoints to deal with it. He denies it. So in Japan the harm that a prank causes the police is measured by how the police decide to react to it, and the police boxes operate on the premise that all shouts, all calls, all firecrackers have to be treated as real until they are proved to be a joke.