In what city did you interact with police?
Thinking back I left out a couple encounters.
4. Asked the police box staff if they knew how to get to my hotel (this was before smartphones were common), they helped me (Tokyo)
5. Filed a lost item report (my wallet was stolen, in Japan!) (Tokyo). Didn't turn up (duh) but I think I needed a piece of paper to get back my teikiken on my Suica card.
6. Filed another lost "item" report (a dog I was taking care of ran off. Man, that was nerve-wrecking). They actually helped me look for the dog I think! (No relation with the dog incident in Matsue.) (Shounan region, Kanagawa prefecture)
7. I was cycling to work and it was raining. I was holding an umbrella in one hand and a police car passed by and they used their loudspeakers to tell me to close my umbrella (but didn't stop me or anything). This was in a rather rural area of a rural town (Matsue). I think this is a recently introduced law -- someone holding an umbrella while cycling bumped? crashed? into someone and actually killed them. :/
8. Apparently police box officers walk around the neighborhood ringing on every doorbell and asking if anything's been up lately. That happened in Nagoya a couple weeks ago. I liked it.
My experiences with the Japanese police:
1. I once found a wallet and carried it all the way to a nearby police box. Had to fill out some forms but no problems.
2. Another time I found and captured a dog running around town and had the police come to fetch it. Again no problems.
3. Just today while renewing my driver's license, I had some time before the lecture started so I walked out of the classroom and searched for a vending machine. I probably looked like I was a bit lost, and a police officer asked me what was wrong.
- Anyway - The plural of anecdote isn't data but I've only had nice encounters with the Japanese police so far.