[csomar]

Not sure why people want to stick to a rule that could get them in real trouble. I am speaking from real experience. The police is very unlikely to want to arrest/take you to the station for not having your passport. On the other hand, if you do lose your passport and you have a slow/far embassy then you are in real trouble.

[makeitdouble]

The police will stop you for any random reason, including walking alone in the street at an unusual hour or just to check your bike.

From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport.

All of this is just mild inconvenience, except it will happen a lot more frequently than losing one's passport.

PS: For the real trouble relative to passports, an embassy can reemit an emergency passport within a day, and you can probably reemit the visa at an immigration branch. It's not fun for sure, but I'm not sure it's real troubles.

[csomar]

> The police will stop you for any random reason, including walking alone in the street at an unusual hour or just to check your bike.

Parent was talking about Japan not the US. In most of the world, the police will leave you alone unless they have to intervene. In Japan, they’ll probably want to really help you and not add an arrest to their record.

> From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport

Again, highly an American perspective where the police is fishing for arrest reasons. The rest of the world doesn’t allocate much resources to the police so they bus around people without very exigent reasons.

[makeitdouble]

I was referring to Japan. Police will very easily stop you [0], the more you diverge from what they expect to see at that time and place, the higher your chances will be to have a chat with them.

As you point out, it's also not heavy and tensed confrontation as it could be in other countries. You won't get shot at a wrong move, officers are polite, they're not there to piss you, don't specially expect you to be in the wrong and really would prefer to get it done and go on with their watch.

That's where keeping credible papers on you makes it a painless 30s interaction and not a long and awkward drag to the station that nobody wants.

> The rest of the world doesn’t allocate much resources to the police

Japan police has a decent HR budget to keep officers around in the communities. Which is a truely good thing, police becomes very integrated to the daily life of the people there, while fully expecting to have nothing to do all day long outside of helping elderlies cross the street and dealing with kids getting lost.

[0] At least I got stopped a decent amount, and that is a pretty shared sentiment I heard a lot. The only exceptions were daily suit people and women.