"thegoons" <thegoons@bigpond.com> wrote ...
> We have all seen it:
>
> - three men waving flags on a highway to indicate a lane closure
>
> - five policemen standing at the pedestrian crossing outside Lumine in
> Shinjuku to direct pedestrians across a street that maybe 1 car in 5
minutes
> uses

<further examples snipped>

The Japanese have nothing on us here in Taxa ... er, Massachusetts.

Here we are required to have uniformed police officers attending every time
so much as a manhole cover is popped, even if it's an emergency on a
dead-end street at 2 in the morning.  The difference is that you seem to be
saying that in Japan they actually at least make the motions of directing
traffic, even where not needed -- here, they spend their time watching the
hole in the ground for some dangerous subterranean creature to emerge
(Mothra, perhaps ;-), or keeping the workers entertained by chatting with
them, when they're not sleeping in their car or having coffee in a local
shop.  The traffic, of course, is left to duke it out on their own, without
assistance or direction.

These are called "paid details", and the lucrative pay is above and beyond
the officers' regular salary.  For many, this raises their pay to yuppie
levels, over $100,000 in a year.  A better term than paid detail would be
"protection racket", since someone failing to work with a detail (even if
they tried and were unable to get one) faces being hauled off to jail.