This is one show I didn’t have to download.
Police are not an uncommon sight in Tokyo. There are Koban (police boxes) all over the place. You see policemen on their bicycles all the time. It gives one a feeling of comfort and security. Police in large numbers, however…
That’s a different story.
I was greeted with a most unusual sight when I got home this past Tuesday. (Well, not “home” precisely – I mean back to Asakusa.) I walked out of the station and saw more cops in one place than I’d ever seen in Japan.
Lots of them.
Not only cops, but extra police cars, invesitigative dudes, crime scene tape and even some of those spiffy evidence numbers CSI guys use to mark stuff at crime scenes.
What the hell was going on?
There were a lot of people taking photos, and even a couple guys with video cameras that were way too big to be consumer-grade gear. I didn’t see any recognizable news logos though, so maybe they were just well-equipped freelancers.
Of course, I took photos too:
This was how things looked at first glance. I wasn’t sure what was going on, so I crossed the street to see if I could find out what had taken place.
After crossing, this guy was the first thing to catch my eye. (The dude on the right, not Mr. Happy there on the left.) I’d never seen one of these jackets before, so I knew something out of the ordinary had happened.
There was too much activity around the actual scene to get a good shot from that side of the street, so I crossed back over and did my best to shoot it from the station side.
Dude! Is that a bloodstain?!? O.o
And right under the night deposit slot of Mizuho bank, no less. Clearly, some shit had gone down.
I got ahold of Miyoko when I got home and asked her to check out the news that evening. She called back after the 9PM NHK report, but they’d said nothing about it.
I still haven’t heard any solid news on what happened, but I can make a pretty good guess. Some guy goes to make his evening deposit and gets jacked at the bank. I have to wonder if he fought back, or if he was attacked without warning and went down before he knew what was going on. I couldn’t get a clear enough view of the scene to see what the evidence markers were there for, but I hope it was just footprints and other non-scary stuff (like shell casings, for example).
I can only hope that if the guy was approached for the money that he didn’t fight back. I remember when I was working retail that we were always told (especially around Xmastime when the nightly deposits could have $10,000+ in them) that if we were threatened for the deposit bag we were to hand it over and then notify the police.
Because somebody else’s money isn’t worth trying to be a hero over.
Regardless of what happened, I hope whoever bled on the sidewalk is okay.
Unless it was the attacker, of course.