From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport.
All of this is just mild inconvenience, except it will happen a lot more frequently than losing one's passport.
PS: For the real trouble relative to passports, an embassy can reemit an emergency passport within a day, and you can probably reemit the visa at an immigration branch. It's not fun for sure, but I'm not sure it's real troubles.
Parent was talking about Japan not the US. In most of the world, the police will leave you alone unless they have to intervene. In Japan, they’ll probably want to really help you and not add an arrest to their record.
> From there, if you have nothing to officially prove your identity you might totally spend a while at the station, and potentially have them kindly escort you to your home so they get a look while you're looking for your passport
Again, highly an American perspective where the police is fishing for arrest reasons. The rest of the world doesn’t allocate much resources to the police so they bus around people without very exigent reasons.
The court was willing to stamp and sign that I have that passport and it matches me, so it is probably good enough for most police if I offer to show them the original at home.
That being said having a photo of your passport and relevant stamps is good advice, but only to make it slightly easier to deal with all the hassel that comes if you do lose your passport.
Note that this doesn't include your passport stamp pages but Japan hasn't issued passport stamps for several years now and they just look up your passport in a registry instead. So for that purpose, a true copy should be effectively the same thing.
That's where it comes down to what is essentially a technicality but given they carry an embossed seal and signature with the words "TRUE COPY" on them, they look very official and officials are very rarely going to push back on it even if whether they are to be treated as a full substitute for a passport (for identification purposes) is technically a grey area.
Unless you are involved with a particular interaction, they just want to check your visa status. A passport photo/stamp will do if their system is digitized. Arresting someone (except for the US where the police likes to arrest people) is a major hassle.
To csomar: you are willingly spreading harmful advice. Stop it. Stop making people reply to clean up your mess.
