2014 06 18 Sato Mitsunori
Channel: dper1112
Date: 2014-06-18

A plain-clothes Japanese police officer by the name of Sato Mitsunori asks for my Zairyu Card today at a subway station.  We converse for a little bit.  I ask to see his Keisatsu Techo, which is a police badge and ID card.  He shows it to me but says I can't shoot video of it.

Before and after this video, I asked him about his job.  He says he and his partner go around to different stations asking for foreigners'  ID cards to find people overstaying their visas.  I asked if that was a common occurrence, and he says mostly among people from nearby Asian countries.  You might then wonder why he's asking white folk for their IDs.

In theory he's trying to catch me overstaying my visa.  In reality he's doing what his boss told him, which is to go ID foreigners, ostenstibly to find people overstaying their visas, but in practice it's not going to work.  The vast majority of non-Japanese residents in Japan are from Asia, and so are the vast majority of visa overstayers.

Visa overstaying numbers declined over the last five or seven years, according to the most recent data I've seen (which is not particularly recent).  You can imagine if more recent data showed a surge in immigration violations we would be seeing that in the conservative newspapers.  We haven't, which means immigration crimes are probably not increasing.