Alfred Weinzierl is well-known to police in Osaka: A middle-aged rakish German wearing a puppet shark and an oversized chicken hat tends to stand out.
Sometimes Weinzierl even sets Kingyo, his beloved shark hand puppet, on police officers he hasn’t encountered before.
While this is done in jest, and to break the ice, Weinzierl’s bigger point is that “people deserve respect because of what they do. They don’t reserve respect because they wear a uniform or because they are a police lieutenant or a judge or whatever.”