'Sword bearers by day, patrol officers by night': autumn joint drill on a Fukagawa cordon — 'Judge a sword by the times it stayed sheathed,' says Chitose Kanome

3 a.m., Fukagawa 2-chome. A practice cordon was strung around the site where three metal containers drifted ashore in August. Fourteen licensed sword bearers from the Tokei branch of the Hinokuni Sword Bearers' Association, eleven covert patrol officers from the Tokei branch of the Patrol Guild, and staff from the TDA Biological Control Division and the police took part. The scenario: one designated drift species inside the cordon, two residents left behind.

The patrol officers moved first. The eleven, in dark charcoal utility clothing, scattered inside the cordon without a signal, and five minutes later radioed: "Two resident stand-ins confirmed. Second floor, apartment on the north side." This reporter stood in the same alley and did not hear a single footstep.

"Not being heard is the job," Iori Kiryu, 29, said afterwards. "Our work is to find, and to say where. We do nothing beyond that." The covert patrol service was created in 2005, in the reforms after the Ninefold Fog: people left inside a cordon are to be found without a sound. The lesson of "the twelve of the Fog" is where this work began.

When the officers reported "species stand-in, behind the materials yard", the sword bearers and the capture team of the Biological Control Division moved. The sword bearers wear a navy uniform with a special-provision sword at the left hip, its registration number cut into the hilt. Chitose Kanome led. While the capture team set its net, Kanome stood squarely before the stand-in with her hand on the hilt — and did not draw. The drill ended in capture.

"Didn't draw today either. That is how it should be," Kanome said. The licensed sword bearer was created by the 1994 Sword Carrying Special Provisions Act, after certain designated drift species were found to let bullets pass through them; blades, for reasons still unknown, do not. "Because it isn't understood, the sword is the last, last resort. Before you draw, there is everything else."

Kanome has accompanied 27 exclusion operations, the most of any serving sword bearer, and drawn three times. "Twenty-four of the twenty-seven, the sword stayed in. Judge me on the twenty-four. The three, I still dream about."

Abroad, sword bearers are reported as "samurai" and patrol officers as "ninja". The Amerian streaming drama "TOKEI SAMURAI" was much discussed here; Kanome laughed: "Haven't seen it. We have no samurai running around in hakama." Soichiro Koka, 64, head of the guild's Tokei branch, gave the line he gives at every interview: "Call us ninja if you like. But we throw no blades and we hide no faces. Whoever hides his face is not a patrol officer."

Both are popular careers among the young: about twenty applicants per sword-bearer licence, more than ten per patrol licence. "Samurai or ninja?" is the standing joke of high-school career talks, and many sit both exams and fail both.

The two bodies drill together twice a year. This time, after the first night-time exclusion operation on August 30 in the bay warehouse district, the emphasis was on the night division of labour. "At night the officers go in first and report positions; then the sword bearers and the capture team move. Keeping that order is the whole of safety," a Biological Control officer said.

The drill ended at 4:40 a.m. The sword bearers checked their blades and returned to the vans; the patrol officers had at some point simply gone. A man of 58 watching from outside the cordon said: "Is it over? The ninja — I never saw them come, and I never saw them leave."