A bus jacking

While my wife was in Tokyo, I went to the local curry shop for lunch. We buy our ground coffee from them. The first time we went, we liked their coffee, so my wife asked where they got it, thinking that she could contact that company. However, the woman in the shop said that they order extra coffee for several people and she was more than willing to get some for us. The outcome was that we buy all our fresh coffee from the curry shop. I was getting very low on coffee so I went to buy some if they had it or order some if they had none in the store.

Now to the picture. While waiting for my chicken curry lunch, I was reading the newspaper and noticed the article in the left corner of page one. While this is a serious event, it does illustrate one of the positive reasons I live in Japan. A man took over a highway bus by force. However, since guns are illegal and very hard to get here, the best he could do for a weapon was a fruit knife. The usual procedure in cases like this is for the police to follow the bus until it has to stop and then talk the hijacker into giving up. If they can't do this, they get most of the passengers out the rear or the windows while distracting the hijacker, and then they simply overpower him. There are seldom an injures in this sort of event and, if there are, they are usually non life threatening cuts. I believe that in most cases in the US the hijacker would be armed with at least a pistol and that the outcome would be the death of one or more people. It is much more peaceful here.