I think the Oct. 28 Timeout article "Masters of all they survey" does a disservice to foreigners when it mentions, without fully stating the law, that police have the right to request to see a foreigner's alien registration card. Police may do so only if a foreigner is suspected of committing a crime in the area.
The law is very specifically worded to avoid ethnic profiling, and this should have been mentioned in the article. Otherwise, the reader could be misled into misunderstanding the amount of power the police have regarding a random request to see your "gaijin card."
samuel varian
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