NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe.. This

NOPE happens to him, he had to squeeze himself out of that phone booth and run after a red light started flashing and the door slammed shut on his shoe.. This did not happen. Almost no Japanese public telephones even in 2022 have a) doors which lock or b) motors/servos to operate the door. The exception on motors is a specialty item "automatic door (electric type)" which is sold primarily as an accessibility aid for people who cannot operate unpowered doors. The door, in all cases, is for caller privacy, not for preserving the integrity of telephone billing. I feel _extremely_ confident in this, and confident that you would get an immediate on-the-record denial from NTT if you asked. One reason among many: if the phone booth was physically capable of locking people inside that would endanger human life in a natural disaster, and the first rule of engineering in Japan is that one's system must function during natural disasters. On this I will see "I once talked to a Japanese woman" and raise you "I have written the acceptance testing protocols required by that 'rule' for a firm which produced publicly-deployable hardware artifacts." plus "I have two working eyeballs and can confirm the absence of a motor in almost all telephone deployments." (Apologies for someone-is-wrong-on-the-Internet here but we were extremely serious about rule #1.)