Tokyo's videophone police boxes

Latest innovation by the Tokyo police force is videophone kiosks in koban (police boxes) so that you can talk to a cop face to face if everyone happens to be out on patrol (or gone for the night). Looks like they're going one step further, too--this kiosk we snapped the other night was in a diminutive hut under a road bridge that didn't seem to have anything else in it. The kiosks do let you do things like calling up and printing out information such as maps to a particular address or the to nearest station or bus stop, but we suspect this cellphone thing that one or two people in Japan seem to have these days might make them a touch irrelevant for most folks.

[Crossposted to Engadget]