An ingenious non-Japanese patron uses her camera at a kaitenzushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant, catching glimpses of the various Japanese customers and their reactions.
The restaurant in the video is located in Tomakomai, Hokkaido.
An older video from 2006. This one is located in Asakusa, Tokyo.
Via Danny Choo‘s.
+1
Too much “Privacy” just severs the links between people. If everybody respected the privacy of others and didn’t approach or confront others. Then their wouldn’t even be something called friends in the world. After all, when you first met them, one of you approached the other and disturbed his “privacy.”
I agree that as long as no harm done, this kind of horse play is fine if not funny.
Truly an xkcd momnet.
I was so hoping the guy taking a drink from his glass would do a spit-take when his eyes locked with the camera!
I am totally surprised at the negative reactions of the board members here regarding the privacy issue. Any one of those people, if they had been offended, could easily and simply have tossed a napkin over the camera before it reached them and voided the whole issue. The fact that none of them even attempted to preserve their privacy when they clearly and simply could have done so implies a consent to being filmed.
It’s like being at a wedding. If you see someone taking copious amounts of pictures and you don’t want your photo to be taken, you tell the photographer. If you don’t inform the photographer, then you have consented to being photographed. No consent form is really required. That’s why you see so many wedding film bloopers on TV. Do you really and seriously think the photographer went out and got the consent of EVERY person in the video before submitting it to the TV show?
Films and photos shot on a street don’t have that immediacy of reaction, hence the requirement that the people’s faces be blurred. You can’t, the moment you see someone a hundred feet (30 meters) away filming you, rush over and block them from taking your picture. That’s too much to expect someone to do, hence the courts have repeatedly sided with people who were filmed without their consent.
And considering the quantity of cameras in Japan, I’m sure this issue has been hashed out already, thus no real invasion of privacy has taken place.
Now, morally, whether she should have done this is another issue.
It’s not that simple, the Japanese aren’t into confrontations, and a camera suddenly appearing, aimed at you, is confronting. Who’s watching the conveyer belt constantly? There wouldn’t be time to throw a napkin over it, and at the same time I imagine noone would want to interfere with it (how do you know it’s recording you?).
Having read all these comments, there’s a lot of social subtleties to take into account. As has been said *so* many times already, society has certain expectations. Candid photography in Japan isn’t really acceptable, whereas in the US people generally seem cool with it. And don’t conflate this with Big Brother and CCTV cameras everywhere, that’s not the same thing (though it’s related).
My lawyer friend tells me that here in Australia we don’t actually have any real laws that protect against “invasion of privacy” (I haven’t grilled him about the specifics). That’s not really the issue though, I think the social acceptability is far more important.
And bloody hell, based on these comments, can’t I visit any other country in the world without some bastard stealing my camera if I put it down for five seconds?
It’s not necessarily that bad, it’s just that you shouldn’t expect to keep your camera if you do something like this. Keeps the disappointment of having actually been stolen reduced.
How uptight and how miserable and unsatisfied do you have to be to say “A camera is an invasion of my privacy in a public place and it better not end up on the internet!”
I guess family reunion pictures and graduation pictures must have the photographer sign a waiver to not post pictures on internet. Or said pictures will have several faces blurred out.