Yokohama Customs Office

We took at school field trip to the Yokohama customs museum. English link for museum info here.
The customs museum is near the Sakuragicho Minato Mirai area (more or less), down by the water (sorta, check the map). It’s not a place I would have visited on my own, but it was much more interesting than I expected.

There are cool exhibits about busting contraband smugglers.

There were 250 kg of illegal substances behind a fake wall in a container discovered about 6 years ago. These containers are used for shipping things by boat, and a built to be either 25 meters, or 40 meters long according to ISO specifications (apparently). The inspectors noticed that this one appeared a bit shorter than usual from the inside.

250kg of whatever this type of illegal substance is makes for 150億円 (15,000,000,000 dollars?). And it was lost!

That’s enough to get someone fired. This amount of substance could have been used 8,330,000 times. That’s enough to keep Yokohama genki for quite some time…

Apparently bad people also stick contraband into Budweiser cans. What person on the up-and-up would drink that stuff anyway?

On another note…

This is Custom-kun.

He’s the mascot (or image character, as Japanese like to say) for Yokohama Customs.

This guy is tough on crime.

Go visit the Yokohama Customs Museum if you have a chance. Custom-kun is waiting.

Click here for a close up of our furry illegal baggage-catching friend.

Why does custom-kun look like a fat bear-dog?

- Harvey