Restrictions on Women Police Officers’ Duties

Restrictions on Women Police Officers’ Duties are shown through Ayumi’s description of a police service that welcomes women into its ranks but denies them meaningful authority. Though she had performed well in firearms training and could handle a baton better than most men, she was denied a weapon and confined to routine duties; the restriction makes institutional sexism tangible in the daily allocation of work, not merely in official principles of equality.

The Work Ayumi Is Allowed to Do

Ayumi says the appeal of police work had been its promise of action, but her actual job amounted to wearing a uniform for show and driving a small police car to check improperly parked vehicles. She was not allowed a pistol or any other weapon. Instead, she marked the time and registration number of offending cars in chalk on the asphalt, including cars parked in front of fire hydrants. The contrast between the responsibilities she hoped for and this narrowly prescribed work gives the restriction its ordinary, repetitive form.

The limits are not explained by lack of ability. Ayumi says she had good results in shooting practice, and she discusses the Beretta semi-automatic with practical familiarity, noting its weight when loaded and its manageable recoil. She also recalls that she did well with batons and that most men could not beat her in training. Yet these skills carry no weight with her superiors: her competence does not open a path to armed or active police work.

A Gendered Hierarchy Within the Police

Ayumi describes the institution as a closed system and says her police relatives—her father, older brother, and an uncle—helped her gain admission. That family connection brought her into the service, but it did not protect her from the gendered restrictions she encountered after joining. She had not understood their extent beforehand; once inside, she found women treated as second-class citizens.

The duties she lists extend beyond traffic enforcement. Women are assigned paperwork at desks, safety instruction for elementary-school children, and searches of female suspects, while men whom Ayumi considers less competent advance into positions of responsibility. The institution’s public profession of equal opportunity therefore clashes with the distribution of actual work and authority. Ayumi connects that disparity to women losing their enthusiasm for the job: exclusion is sustained not only by the denial of weapons, but by a system that repeatedly channels women away from consequential roles.

Skill, Sexualization, and Resistance

Ayumi’s account also shows how her ability is recast by male colleagues. Rather than take her baton skill seriously, some make obscene insinuations about the way she holds it. Their response turns professional training into a sexual joke and reinforces the boundary they impose: a woman’s demonstrated competence is not accepted as a basis for advancement, but is made an occasion for ridicule.

Her frustration is sharpened by the gap between physical capacity and institutional permission. She believes that even a small woman can manage a Beretta through practice, yet senior officers treat an armed woman as unacceptable. Her criticism of the police leadership as macho and reactionary follows from this mismatch between what women can do and what the organization will allow them to do. The scene gives Ayumi a direct account of discrimination rather than treating it as an abstract policy problem.

Wider Significance

The novel places Ayumi’s account alongside the Dowager’s response to domestic abuse, revealing two different failures and forms of action. Ayumi describes formal authority being withheld from women within the police. The Dowager, by contrast, organizes a private safe house for women and children escaping violence, supports their search for work and permanent housing, and relies on Tamaru when physical intervention is needed. Her network exists because, as she acknowledges, she and Tamaru cannot resolve every case and the law is sometimes of no help.

The contrast does not make the safe house a substitute for institutional reform: it shows how care and protection are assembled outside official channels when those channels are inadequate. The Dowager’s determination to shelter Tsubasa and her insistence that the man who harmed her must eventually be stopped give that informal response a more forceful edge. Against this background, Ayumi’s account of women barred from effective police work belongs to the same wider pattern: women’s safety and agency depend on structures that can exclude them even while claiming to serve the public.