Number 110 Day in Japan (10/01)

On January 10, Japan unofficially celebrates Number 110 — Day, which is written on any public telephone booth and which is known to every child. This is the emergency call number to the police.

9,000,000. This is the approximate number of calls that the police service number 110 — hyaku-toban receives annually. It is estimated that one call is made in about three and a half seconds, in other words, every 14th resident of Japan dials this number, reporting the incident, hoping for the protection and help of police professionals.

Number 110 began operating in Japan in 1948, first in 8 major cities — Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Nagoya and Fukuoka. At first there were two numbers: 110 and 1110, but from July 1, 1954, as a result of the introduction of a new police law, one number — 110 was adopted everywhere.

The reasons why this particular number was chosen are simple and clear: — number can easily be remembered by anyone, — to avoid typing errors, only 3 digits were specified, — on the phone disk the distance to the number 1 is the shortest.

And after the number was selected, the day — was set naturally, the first month, the tenth.

What messages does number 110 tirelessly receive? For example, this could be a message about a robbery of a small private store, about a broken window of an expensive jewelry store, about a car accident, about a driverless car standing on the side of the road. There are also many unpleasant calls from telephone hooligans, as well as ridiculous requests: help deal with the cockroach, headache — buy pills, tell me the departure time of the plane.

Now number 110 is multi-channel, but in case of a large number of calls, the answering machine will ask you to wait. It is usually not recommended to hang up and call back, because in this case your call will automatically be the last, and therefore the time before transmitting an important message and taking rescue measures will increase.

In America and Canada, a similar number is 911, and in most European countries — number 112. In Russia, a single emergency call number was introduced in 2013.

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