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I have an umbrella with a pretend samurai sword handle made of plastic that I carry on my backpack. Security let it through for my flight from LAX to NRT. On the way back, NRT security cited the handle as prohibited and I was forced to give it up.

Why the discrepancy and could I have argued a case to keep it?

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  • 9
    Airport security always treated weapon look-alikes like the real things and confiscated them.
    – Nean Der Thal
    Commented Oct 4 at 13:49
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    Airport security rules / interpretation thereof vary. What passes in LAX isn’t necessarily going to get through elsewhere.
    – Traveller
    Commented Oct 4 at 13:52
  • 23
    Arguing with airport security is rarely a winning strategy, and can backfire badly,.
    – DavidRecallsMonica
    Commented Oct 4 at 14:06
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    @DavidRecallsMonica agree which is why I didn't. Just annoyed now at the discrepancy.
    – findwindow
    Commented Oct 4 at 14:12
  • 2
    Sorry for your loss. I'm neither a weeb nor a weapon fetishist but that's a pretty cool umbrella.
    – pipe
    Commented Oct 5 at 9:16

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First, each country (or group of countries, sometimes) sets its own rules for security. While they more or less align because they generally follow the same objective, there is no obligation for them to be the same everywhere. Japan and the US can have different rules, and you can't do anything about that.

Next, rules are not always applied consistently and extensively. They are human, they miss things. Frequent travellers have lots of stories of the forgotten Swiss Army knife or screwdriver somewhere in their bag which went through a dozen flights and as many security checks in different countries before someone finally noticed it and confiscated it (for an item that is nearly universally banned). Different scanner technologies may also have an influence, as well as training.

In this specific case, there may also be a cultural aspect: a Japanese agent is more likely to recognise a samurai sword handle than a US agent.

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    Exactly! To me, this looks like an umbrella handle. To a typical Japanese person, it looks like a sword handle.
    – TonyK
    Commented Oct 6 at 0:14
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    I am from the UK and this definitely looks like a sword handle to me.
    – Tom
    Commented Oct 6 at 13:05
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    Even aside from “they are human, they miss things”, any real-world set of rules is inevitably going to have borderline cases that come down to a judgement call, which can reasonably be decided differently by one agent than another. And “lookalike items” is an obvious source of borderline cases — obviously realistic replica weapons can’t be permitted, obviously sufficiently unrealistic ornaments are harmless, but somewhere in the middle each agent has to make a judgement call.
    – PLL
    Commented Oct 6 at 16:23

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