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Comment by innocenat | Hacker News Reader

You are joking, but it's illegal in Japan to carry a locked-blade knives or folding knives with blade longer than 5.5cm. You need a solid reason to carry those, like if you just buy it from the shop (in the original package), or if you are a chef, etc.

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Same in the UK, but the police can also decide you don't have a valid reason for a legal to carry pocket knife, and charge you anyway.

Likewise in Ireland[1].

[1]: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/1990/act/12/section/9/ena...

Same in Denmark. Perhaps this is standard in a lot of western countries?

Sweden is the same, carrying almost any kind of knife in a public space is generally illegal. There are exceptions, such as construction workers who need to carry knives and other pointy things for work, but generally it's not allowed.

Yet people bring knifes to picnics, walks, hikes all the time.

"Normal use of pocket knife" is how the police formulates one of the exceptions or carve-outs for legitimate use of a knife in public spaces. There is a lot of leeway there.

Yup – in fact I think the picnic case is exemplified in a Swedish Supreme Court ruling. It just goes to show that a lot of laws aren't so clear cut. ;o)

Is fishing legal anywhere in Japan?

If so, then do people have to take the fish home before cleaning them or can they prepare and eat them while camping, etc?

Fishermen and scuba divers are, in practice, generally not going to be busted by police for having a normal-size knife in Japan. Of course, this is the problem with the legal strategy of “make it illegal but give enforcement discretion to the police” - it adds a lot of uncertainty to what you are actually allowed to do, it allows the government to convict many normal people of a crime if they want to, and it gives the police discretion to get people in trouble for arbitrary reasons.

Yes, this. As the old Soviet saying went, "show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

When you place the burden on the people and not the state - often through "common sense laws/regulation" - you inherently enable subjective and arbitrary enforcement of the law.

This unfortunate trend not only creates and enables petty tyrants, but disproportionally afflicts the most vulnerable in society and politically disfavored minorities.

>it gives the police discretion to get people in trouble for arbitrary reasons.

it also gives police discretion to avoid getting people into trouble because of too rigid rules. Many countries have a lot of lenience about the enforcement of relatively harmless drugs, for example.

Lenience and judgement on part of a police force is a good thing, and a necessary thing because reality is complicated and rules don't always make sense. The way you frame the issue just shows that you have low trust in your respective police force, in which case the issue is quality of policing, not rigidity of the law.

I think that's pretty common, San Francisco has the same types of rules (3 inches is the max if I remember correctly).

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