No... Really no. I'm old enough and traveled enough to have experienced East Germany. That was a police state. Japan of the 21st century is most definitely not a police state. ...
I agree completely and was going to post essentially the same thought above, but I decided to avoid a semantic argument. One could argue for caling any state/country that employs police to enforce law and order a "police state" I suppose. But Japan is not remotely close to the conventional definition and usage of the expression. See for example
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police state
which, for those of you who don't want to bother clicking, says
"a political unit characterized by repressive governmental control of political, economic, and social life usually by
an arbitrary exercise of power by police and
especially secret police in place of regular operation of administrative and judicial organs of the government according to publicly known legal procedures". Text made
bold for emphasis.
Here is a list of characteristics of a police state:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/...ce-state-and-how-they-are-appearing-in-the-us
And here is a list of specific current and recent countries classified as police states:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Police_state#A_few_clear-cut_examples_of_police_states
And finally, like
@TheScientist, I have spent some time in places that are or were police states according to such normal understandings of the term (notably the old Soviet Union, some Eastern European countries in the Soviet era and Chile under Pinochet), and no one could possible mistake them, their public life or their police for anything even vaguely resembling the situation in current day Japan.
Btw, in the decades just before and during WW-2, Japan was a police state.
In other words, to say that Japan is currently a police state is to either mean something unconventional by the term or, more simply, to be wrong. Calling it a "benign police state" is somewhat clarifying but also an oxymoron.
-Ww