judasfm

I've been getting a lot of conflicting information on this (garnered off the internet and various TV dramas, admittedly) and in many cases no answers at all, so I thought I'd ask here as I need information for a story. Specifically I'd really like to know:

1. Is the NPA made up of regular police officers who have transferred or been promoted 'out of uniform' (such as CID in England)?

2. If my character joined the NPA, would he have to go through police academy training, or could he join straight from college? (I'm assuming the NPA would have its own training scheme...?)

3. Does the NPA ever deal with the public in the same way as the regular police? For example, could a member of the public just walk into the NPA headquarters off the street?

4. Do NPA agents have full powers of arrest?

Please note I'm not looking for statistics such as the current number of NPA agents, why it was formed, what it's supposed to do etc :-) The internet's full of this information. I'm curious about more day-to-day things.

Thanks in advance to anyone who answers :-)

I saw this film on the Horror Channel in UK ages ago and I can't remember what it was called.

Basically, what I can remember is this:

A group of people end up in the (rather damp) hold of a large ship. Unfortunately, the crew aren't keen on having stowaways. One by one, they sort of pick each other off (the stowaways kill a crew member and hide him in his bunk, one of the stowaways - who's pregnant - is killed).

At some point, one of the stowaways starts to transmit a radio message, only to be caught by one of the crew (an old guy who tells her to finish her transmission and gives her their coordinates).

There's a big showdown on the top deck; one of the surviving stowaways manages to get into a raft and escapes, another is placed into a shark cage and lowered into the water to drown. In the end, the survivors manage to stay alive (although the guy in the raft pretends otherwise, mainly to screw with his friend's head!)

I know it was originally in a foreign language and dubbed in English, but I don't know what that language was. I also know it's not much to go on, but I really would like to get a copy of this film off Amazon or someplace, so if anyone can recognize it from my rather sketchy memories, please can you tell me the title!

Thanks :-)

I'm trying to learn more about Japanese culture, and while most of the sites I've found go into detail about bowing and how deep you should bow and who should bow first etc, their comments are targeted at adults. So far none of the sites I've visited have anything to say about Japanese children bowing.

So to take an example, if a Japanese child was introduced to an adult (such as a friend of his/her parents' who was coming over for dinner) would that child bow? And if so, would the adult bow back (kind of like in the West when an adult will shake a child's hand, not out of respect so much as courtesy/humoring the child).

I apologize if this question seems a little obvious, but like I said, it's not mentioned on any sites that I can find, nor is it in any of my books and I'm curious.

Answers from a native Japanese person strongly preferred. When answering, please put your source :-)

If both worked for the same company, but the younger man (say 20s) was higher up in that company than the older (40s) would it be offensive for him to refer to the older man as -kun (say, Sato-kun)?

I've heard people say that -kun is only for boys younger than you, but others say that you can use it for those of a lower status than you (I assume that would mean from a boss to an employee?) On a side note, yes, I know it's probably highly unlikely that a man in his twenties would be senior to one in his forties; this is a purely hypothetical question to try and help me understand a little more :-)

Answers from native Japanese speakers strongly preferred. When answering, please put your source :-)