Previously, Takashi wound up running into Shouko and she more or less blew him off while he could only comment that she seemed cuter. At Johnson's everyone talked about the guys who had gotten grabbed by the cops before heading over to Karen's to drink. Takashi's drinking was covered by Mitsu and Saeko asked him why Yuko came to her to borrow money (the same money she'd loaned Takashi for his bike). Drunk and feeling like a loser for being broke, Takashi came across a (probably drunk) woman sleeping in a shrine and robbed her of her purse only to find next to nothing and feeling shitty about it the whole time.
At Yuko's he tried to blow off some steam with her but stopped when she asked him to bite her breasts because he realized that some other guy had probably done that to her as well in the past. At home the next morning his mother received a call stating he was wanted to come down to the police station for "voluntary" questioning. Realizing they were building a file on him he could only realize that he really has become a true gang member.
Interesting fact. I don't know if it still holds true but definitely during the time this series takes place, Japanese police were expected to be trained in judo and other hand-to-hand martial arts so they were definitely no joke in a fight.
They were also trained in traditional Japanese arts like calligraphy and flower arranging. Police work was (and generally still is) seen as a middle class thing and you for the most part had to be a college graduate if you wanted to join.
I wish I could remember the specifics but there's a podcast I listen to called History of Japan that did a two part episode on the Japanese police. Pretty good stuff in general if you can get through questionable audio quality. Tends to go by topic rather than linear so you can skip around to the stuff that interests you. He's doing a series on the Bubble Era right now and goes a lot into a broad overview of the Japanese finance system and its pseudo-trade war with the US at the time.
The interesting thing is that stuff like koban exist pretty much as power projection. More about deterring crime by letting the criminals know that there's always a police presence nearby.
John Diaz
Sounds cool, looks like I have something new to listen to now.
Noah Thomas
It takes a while to find its footing but when it does it's really interesting. There's some episodes I skip (I'm generally not interested in buddhism or mythology for instance) but there's some, like the history of the Japanese space program, that I didn't think would be interesting but were actually pretty neat.
