Ryo has barely pulled the car away from the curb and started driving down the street when we are pulled over by the police. We are all made to stand up against a nearby façade after our i.d.s are all politely placed into the white-gloved hand of the older officer while the other cop methodically pulls out all of Ryo’s camera equipment, unzipping bags, neatly laying tripods, lights, electric cables, and cameras in orderly patterns on the pavement behind the car. The officer in charge quizzes us, our identification still in his hand. Ryo and Itoshin are extremely casual, their answers breezy, brief, and amusingly oblique. The cop seems a bit confused about exactly what he should be asking about: “Where are you going”
“Well, now we’re trying to get home.”
“Why do you have so much equipment?”
“It’s our hobby.”
 “What were you photographing?”
“The beautiful one. (beijin)” Here Ryo gestures his head at Itoshin.
“This is a great deal of equipment. Are you a professional?”
Finally a straight answer. “Yes.”

The slip from street rats to transient workers is abrupt. The equipment so central to the police’s curiosity belies a passing adventure, but something more serious. Yet our purpose as a strange trio, our destination, our institutional positioning, and the intent and potential value is opaque to the cop. This failure of recognition requires the cop to circle back around his line of questioning, like a trapper working down his trap-line, puzzled at the tracks but lack of prey. The other cop is being very thorough, rechecking the interior of the camera bags and shaking each roll of film as if some audible clue of criminality might inadvertently slip out.

The cop interrogating us called his partner over and turned his attention to me. “Excuse me. Where do you live?”

While Ryo and Itoshin were asked about our immediate circumstances, I am taken aback by this more specific question about residence. I elect to be direct and thorough, confronting any ambiguity about origin. “Ah, excuse me. As you can see, I have given you a U.S. passport. But I’ve also given you my foreign resident’s identification which includes my address in Mitaka.”

The officer glances down briefly as if to politely acknowledge my reference to my documents. But he quickly looks back up. “You speak Japanese?”
“Yes, I am conducting research in Tokyo.” Now the officer is taken aback. My Japanese is more formal and while I am speaking in a respectful form, my spoken Japanese lacks the easy flow and parsimonious logic that dispenses with superfluous words—like simply dropping the pronoun “I”. Not only am I speaking Japanese, but too much Japanese such that it exceeds the listener’s expectations of what vernacular Japanese requires. I am self-consciously aware of my spoken Japanese and how I self-present as most users of a second language feel at times. The contrast between my companions and myself is sharp and incongruous. The officer consults quietly with his partner and he returns to their car where a soft staccato of police reports play as a comforting background narration to our small drama. After confirming that I am indeed affiliated with a university, the officer asks, “Are these your friends?”

I hesitate. Power, difference, energies are flowing chaotically while the scene appears so tidy and scripted. Well, obviously, officer. But the friendship apparently lacks sufficient causal evidence. Are we de-linked under the identificatory logics applied to certain youth classes and white foreign men attached to prominent universities? I chose to push the wedge of contradictions already unsettling the officer further and cast the spell of professional magic, hoping it would obfuscate the situation further. “They are my jōhō teikyō-sha.” I replied using an extremely awkward term that would typically only be used in written Japanese and translates literally as “information donor” but loosely means “informant” though not in a police sense as “snitch.” Drawing on Western anthropological vocabularies and their discomfiting alliance with the jargon of detectives and intelligence operatives I attempted to make a tenuous link between the police and myself through awkward transliteration. Was it possible to reroute their procedural interdiction into a transgressing intrusion? Could I telegraph an impersonation of authority? “I am already on the scene and they are under my surveillance apparatus. We both traffic in curiosities and pattern disruption as site of intelligence. We want the same thing. These two are already volunteers in knowledge- making, they have entered into my contract before you arrived.” The officer looked at me with a quizzical expression shadowed with dark suspicion. No Jedi mind tricks manifested and I felt all the more out of place. Wrong move. My Japanese exceeded itself and ended up being only alien and weird. Instead of mimicking the language of power I’d become the center of power’s scrutiny. The officer returned to the patrol car. He bent forward in close conference with the networks of knowledge communicating with him from headquarters, itself undoubtedly leashed to a global policing machine to which we had unwittingly become minor crisis points in this tiny quadrant of its scope.

After five nervous minutes while Ryo and Itoshin sat bored against the wall and I stood uneasily under the junior cop’s gaze, the officer returned and handed my documents back to me. I bowed quickly, murmuring a polite excuse-me, and kept my eyes averted. “Thanks! Sorry for disturbing your evening!” Itoshin apologized cheerily. The cops got back in their cruiser and waited till Ryo slowly pulled us back into traffic. “Haha!” Itoshin yelped excitedly. “I am so glad you came along,” Ryo said, glancing at me in the backseat. “You kept them so distracted they didn’t search the bags very closely. I think I might’ve forgotten a joint or two in a side pocket!” I sank back in the seat and wondered aloud why we’d been targeted twice but weirdly, never while we were skating as if the skating was the most innocent thing we could be doing. It was very unusual. We talked through our behavior, what we looked like, where we were. Nothing about us seemed like an obvious tripwire for police interdiction. It wasn’t until a few days later that it registered: the 34th G-8 summit was scheduled to be held a few weeks later at a lake resort in Hokkaido, the far northern island of Japan, and police preparations to secure the meetings were in full tilt. Our own small incursion into public space was contained and insignificant in contrast to the threats the security apparatus certainly envisaged for itself after the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle had invigorated a new wave of global resistance to corporate and national alliances, a movement soon to articulate itself around Miyashita Park as Nike began to assert a claim over the Shibuya commons.

I cannot know how we appeared to the police. I can only imagine how the three of us might have represented a fabled transnational alliance ready to spring up like a many-headed hydra out of the streets at any moment, causing chaos, interrupting the smooth flow of international governance with spectacle and bodily resistance. Ryo’s camera equipment operated in dual fashion: linking us to the floating world of the mediated youth imaginary, populated by freelancers—photographers, designers, stylists—living in the hazy realm between work and play. But his cameras also linked us to the ubiquitous surveillance mechanism like the one mounted in the dingy pedestrian tunnel, and omnipresent across Tokyo’s surfaces. The attention we drew from the cops was not because of our skateboarding nor the larger incursion into public space created by Ryo’s equipment but instead, I suspect, because of our youth, our gender, and our racial composition in relation to the city and the imminent non-spectacle of the G8. While the police interpellated us into a global imaginary of youth as riotous threat, Ryo and Itoshin were intently focused on the local as a site upon which to enact risky bodily performance and generate a globally-circulated media text.

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