Stoat - Where?

Well I finally did get my bike back. It turns out that I had cocked up the arrangements as I’d thought, as the police tried to deliver it on Wednesday, instead of just calling me. Thankfully though, I was able to arrange for them to come again tonight and at least that went ok. The officer turned up at about 10pm - they really do seem to have odd working hours here. Back home they’d just be gearing up for bashing a few heads together as the pubs kicked out. He took me down to collect the bike from the boot of his unmarked car, which I thought was a little odd. On reflection, I’m not entirely sure he wasn’t doing this in his time off…

He did have fun with me though. In order to reclaim my bike I had to fill in some paperwork. In Kanji. In triplicate. With no carbon paper. Some of the things I had to write I’d never seen before, so he helpfully wrote them out on a scrap piece of paper for me to copy. Why he didn’t just fill in the form himself is beyond me, other than he kept laughing and telling me it was good practice! Every mistake I made I had to cross out and fingerprint to prove that I’d made the alteration. By the end of it, I’d make no less than 15 prints and there seemed more of them than actual useful information. Apparently my hanko is not unique enough to allow retrieval of my bike, even though it was secure enough to open a bank account…

Anyway, the system works, I have my bike, it was delivered for free and as soon as I buy a new lock all will be well again. I even got to see a polaroid photo of the criminal who stole my bike, standing next to it, having just been arrested! If I ever see him again, I’ll…well, to be honest I probably won’t recognise him.

I’m not sure what SOP is for the police back home, but phone calls at 11:45pm are surely not part of it, so I was a little surprised last night to receive a call from an officer telling me that they’ve found my bike! Not my most recent one, although predictably I have recently lost that one too (that’s 3 for 3). I was going to mention it but I’m getting a little bored (that is, embarrassed) of writing every time I lose a bike. You wouldn’t have thought this would be a problem, would you? No, this is one of my two bikes that had previously been nicked, though I don’t know which one yet. It was found in Aichi prefecture, which is at least a couple of hours away by bike and probably longer, and given that it was stolen a few months ago it’s probably had a number of “owners” in the intervening period.

Getting it back might still prove to be a chore. I didn’t just receive one call, I got three, at varying stages of the early hours and all in Japanese. Given my lack of proficiency and semi-comatose state, for all I know I might actually have told them to destroy the bike and turn it into a modern art sculpture for the public’s delight and edification. Still, hope springs eternal that I interpreted correctly and that they’ll be calling again on the 26th, on which day my sole mission will be to be standing next to a Japanese person when it happens. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the one time they called there wasn’t a single Japanese person around to help me out. I might has well have been in England for all my geographical location did me…