Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Naked westerner swims in the Emperor's moat!

Now this is a weird piece of news... So weird in fact that I think it deserves a spot here. See, the Emperor's Palace in Tokyo (about 10 minutes walk from Tokyo Station by the way) is a pretty reclusive place. Visitors get to see the bridges over the moats connecting to the internal gardens and that's typically all you get to see (apart from the statues and a big park around there). It looks like a British tourist decided to jump and swim in the moat naked. If you watch the video you get to actually see something interesting about the Japanese culture too - in one scene the police are running away from the guy who just charges them without anything. They were very very careful not to hurt the guy later too even though he had a big metal stick - at least while the cameras were there but this compared to how the police behaves (even on camera) in the US is a big contrast. For one thing the guy would have been pepper sprayed pretty quickly if not worse.

1 comment:

Betty said...

Actually, according to one news article, the guy was charging the police with a rock in his hand. That probably would have gotten him pepper-sprayed or worse in the US I agree.