'Police, help me, quick! My ice cream is melting'
Saturday August 09 2008
IT was every Japanese housewife's worst nightmare: alone in the house, scared, confused and unable to staunch a baffling flow of thick syrupy liquid. Gripped by fear, she lunged for the telephone and alerted the police. "Help me, quick!" the woman pleaded down the emergency service hotline, "my ice cream is melting."
A year or two ago, the call might have been dismissed as a schoolboy prank or demented ramblings, but for the police in Tochigi prefecture in eastern Japan, the panic-stricken cry for help was part of something much bigger -- a national trend known as youchi-ka, or the "infantilisation" of Japan.
Japanese adults, say police across the country, are calling hyakutouban -- the equivalent of our 999 -- for increasingly trivial and ridiculous domestic reasons. In Kyoto, it is calculated that more than a quarter of emergency calls to the police involve no crime or danger and represent mild everyday inconveniences.
The new flood of calls has included numerous complaints by men that their girlfriends have left them and others that vending machines have failed to return the correct change. Some demand immediate police responses to irregularities with train timetables or simply express general qualms: one person dialled 110 to declare a fear of snakes.
Now, in exasperation at the deluge of calls, the police have published lists of the daftest emergency appeals in an attempt to shame the public into laying off the hotline and leaving it clear for genuine emergencies.
"We had a few of these in the past but the numbers are much greater now," according to Eiki Katayama, chief of the Tochigi prefectural police. "People used to feel a sense of shame in calling the police for these trifles but people now feel they have the right to do so as taxpayers."
Like the person who cycled to a railway station and telephoned the police to complain that her bottom hurt, or another who called to say that the television would not switch on. Police in one rural prefecture fielded a panicky call reporting the presence of a cowpat in the street, while another demanded an immediate police response to the discovery of an oddly coloured Chinese dumpling at a grocery shop.
Other cries for help have included: "I can't seem to cook my rice"; "My fork seems to be bent" and; "I think there may be something on my head." (© The Times, London)
- Leo Lewis in Tokyo
