It’s almost impossible to lose anything in Japan
twistedsifter.com
twistedsifter.com
Is there some kind of HN Japanese article trend recently?
In any case I appreciate the culture of getting lost stuff returned in Japan much more than “magical” conbinis.
The article mentions money so I’ll add my anecdote. Many years ago as a student we had a going away party for some friends who were returning to the US. Someone had a “genius” plan to beat the jet lag. Since their flight was early in the morning we planned an all nighter so they would catch one of the first planes to the airport, board the plane and sleep the entire flight, waking up back in the US “refreshed”.
About half though the night and after way too many drinks I got sick. It was well past last train so my friends hailed me a cab back to my host family’s house about an hour away in suburban Kokobunji. The next thing I know I’m passed out in the back seat of the taxi and my parents wake me up, pay the $100 cab fare and help me into the house.
I wake up the next morning with a stiff hangover to find so much stuff missing, but most importantly my wallet. It had all the important stuff: a couple hundred in yen, my train pass, my ID cards, and most importantly, my residence card. My stomach sank thinking how I’d get it back.
Later that day as I was recovering the taxi driver came by the house and returned my wallet —- everything intact. I offered all the cash I had but he refused to take it. I cannot imagine he would make such a trip back out that far to return some stupid gaijin’s stuff. It left a permanent memory of people’s generosity.
On the flip side, a Japanese friend of mine and I would practice English. He was always interested in US slang, particularly swear words, which he never quite got right. I’ll always remember the day he nailed it.
He got $500 from his grandparents as a present for graduating high school and entering Waseda University. He called me up and says “I lost my wallet, I got the wallet back but fuuuck man, they took the money.”
Accepting that I had lost my phone in a foreign country, I went back upstairs and found it immediately upon walking back into the room. I'd just dropped it under my bag. I went back down and apologized for wasting the receptionists time, but they wouldn't accept it.
The morale of the story being that there was no shortage of help, and that I was a big dummy.
> I was steaming after a night of karaoke and somewhere between the bar, taxi and my hotel, I'd lost my phone.
We (wife and me) had a, now hilarious, run through Melbourne Chasing my iPhone which was ‘stolen’ when we were in a restaurant ; we used the Apple find my phone feature and the phone kept moving all through Melbourne. We had told hotel staff to open up a room we ‘knew’ it was in (luckily they did not), we chased a truck, etc etc. It was in our hotel room, under my bag all that time; I set the stolen sound so it must have made a hell of a fuss; it was making alarm sounds until it was empty. Apple find my phone was absolutely worthless in Melbourne, not sure if it improved but it was fun after; I did not know I would or could run this many miles for a phone. Definitely alcohol as a sober me would’ve probably just emailed the insurance and got a new phone.
Edit; sorry, I always berate people for the word friends (because people use the word for people they have met once and say crap like; I invited 1000 close friends to my wedding etc) and now I do it myself; I have 1 friend and a bunch of ‘personal acquaintances’ in Melbourne.
That reminds me of when I was on a work trip, my wife came with me, but went sightseeing on the weekdays. One day she had gone to Versailles, and wasn't back by the time I got to the hotel after work. After waiting a reasonable amount of time, I called her cell phone and heard it ringing and just about died of anxiety. Fortunately, her phone wasn't left in the room, she was in the hallway, seconds away from opening the door.
Every now and again I get a feeling of nostalgia for the Scotland, and I have to say reading that reminded me so strongly of being there it was unreal.
You could be from anywhere, but it's fascinating what even a single word of slang or dialect will trigger memories and emotions.
The owner of my $50 a night hotel picked us up where I was stuck, insisting we take our skis with us. The next morning he took my keys and insisted we go skiing, and he would take care of getting the car out. He said it would be about $50 (rough conversion from yen) to pay for a tow out with the resort’s groomer. All in all he probably spent 6 hours helping me. The bill was actually $100 (still much cheaper than I actually expected), but he would only accept $50 since that’s what he told me earlier. His wife also called the GPS manufacturer and complained.
I lived there, worked there. I once dated a girl who turned out to have mental health issues. She probably had a sociopathic disorder; often she would just walk into a store and steal groceries. She had money, in fact she was doing very well financially. And yet she stole.
The other time, she came back with a bike she stole from a JR station. She kept it for a few days and then left it somewhere. When necessary, she stole again, again and again.
Japan is strange in many ways. Bikes are registered and have something like a "number plate" (that's a sticker on the frame). I have experienced several police checks myself. I was stopped with my bike every time the police was doing random checks. The police checked the registration and asked me many questions - I guess because of racial profiling (Japan is a very racist country). Why am I telling this? This girl was also stopped a few times with the stolen bikes, but she had this "thing" where she could keep a cool head in such situations and lie/convince people easily. She never felt any consequences for her actions.
To make it short; It was a horrible time dating her. Thank God this "relationship" didn't last too long.
I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that. Of course you have a lot of them in absolute terms in a country of 110M people, but relatively I think they’re doing pretty well.
"Honor" and "a sense of responsibility" explains very little and good, widely distributed Schelling points (koban and, to a lesser extent, commercial/transit centers information/etc desks) that both do the right thing for lost/found items and are widely believed to do the right thing explains most of it.
You are legally entitled to a reward of up to 25% of the lost property's value in Japan. Almost everyone waives it; you'll be asked about it when filling out the paperwork. In my limited experience (five times?) they do try to avoid influencing you either way with the wording, and don't say "Everyone waives this." This does come up occasionally with regards to cash hordes.
Foreigners interacting with this system are, unfortunately, frequently seen as a burden by the cops ("Can't even fill out their own forms grumblegrumble") and brushed off unless someone in the koban decides either to be a go-getter or that this particular foreigner is likely socially established. In some cases the form of the brushoff takes the form of an impromptu Japanese test ("What do you want me to do with that?") where knowing that the magic words ("I would like to file a lost property report." / "紛失物届けを提出したいです”) is treated as being suddenly worthy of prompt service.
This can be heavily YMMV based on the individual cop, the station/koban, and (regrettably) "How likely people who look like you are to be a frequent source of aggravation for cops in this neighborhood?"
I feel like you're bending over backwards to dismiss that this really does come down to culture. At the very least you need a sizable population willing to forgo the easy, untracable reward of free cash/property. Especially when you go on to state that in almost all cases the reward is waived, only further suggesting a culture where honor is more important than spending money.
As someone who has lived in Asia, this different culture exists in some other countries (like korea, possibly to a lesser extent) but is rather absent from China, no doubt influenced by the psychological horrors of china's particularly brutal bout with full marxism.
These aren't "schelling points". The nearest appropriate location of whatever kind (koban if it's outdoors or somewhere small, information desk in a mall or station) is likely obvious to both the loser and finder given the context and is no more a schelling point than, eg, the local hospital if someone got hit by a car.
A real Schelling point is more like, eg, the statue of hachiko in Shibuya which is so famous a landmark and prominent in everyone's shared cultural understanding that if you told two strangers to meet in Shibuya with no other information it's actually pretty likely they'd both just go there by default.
> both do the right thing for lost/found items and are widely believed to do the right thing explains most of it
Yeah, but what you're missing is the expectation that the finder will do the right thing too - which is absolutely cultural.
Could you provide any arguments or evidence to support your claim?
Anecdotaly, we’ve lost bags, bottles, wallets and phones, and everything has (so far) been returned.
Even a missing hat that had travelled all the way down to the end of the train line.
I also left our $200 Strider unattended in the park for several hours, you really don’t think about it too much.
Also when you refer to the stats, which particular statistics do you mean?
Once I found myself in the reverse situation, sitting in a friend's bar when a downpour started. I asked him if I could take one of the abandoned umbrellas to get home, but he refused, saying they belong to his customers. He agreed that no one would ever come back to claim one, laughing at the absurdity of it, but he couldn't risk being discovered as the bartender who abetted the theft of a misplaced umbrella.
I get it though. They are all similar (even though they are not, some still have the plastic wrap or price tag on the handle). Mistakes are mistakes.
What really pisses me off is when you take a nicer one (those clear ones are crap) and it’s totally different from all the other umbrellas and it goes missing. No excusing “sorry I mixed up my clear umbrella with the white handle for your clear umbrella with the white handle”. I hope there’s a social place in hell for those people.
For less than an hour.
I left it at a station. Boarded the train, realised I didn't have it when I got to the other end (and couldn't find the pass to exit). The station staff offered to give me some cash to help me get to my destination and it was no problem I didn't have the pass because I was "obviously respectable".
Then they came back to tell me my things had been found. I asked if I could take the train back to pick it up.
No need! The driver is bringing it to me on the next train, he'll be 30minutes. Please enjoy some free coffee in this cafe and wait.
What a country.
It was a heavily insulated water bottle and keeping ice in it made a world of difference as I was traveling at the hottest time of the year.
A small object can be insignificant when it is anonymous but significant to an individual. It's nice when other humans "have our back" at scale.
I went to the train authority and registered the lost item and everyone assured me that it would be found, no problem. I called back several times over the next 10 days but it never showed up. The train person told me “it must have been a Korean.” I was like, whaaa? My bag is lost and you are going to comfort me with racism?
Ah well, that was literally my only negative experience in the country.
Everybody here is basically making the point that Japanese are extremely unlikely to keep items they find, which is basically as racist as saying "other nationalities are more likely to keep stuff", except that in this particular case, the person singled out a particular nationality instead of generalizing - I find generalizing the whole rest of the world even worse than doing that.
In particular because Koreans have very strong lost and found systems and high trust as well. Blaming Koreans is a reflex given the strong anti-Korean sentiment in Japan.
You can call it racist if you want but it's absolutely true.
You see things getting achieved in ridiculous accuracy and efficiency over there, and it's usually backed by a lot of process, checks and balances. Cleaning the train stations in Tokyo is handled by a special forces level of planning, regiment and and execution.
There's also a lot of human labor involved, locker boxes in big cities are checked daily, maintained daily to weekly, fixed on the spot or marked for maintenance that gets done very quickly. That's all process and regiment, preventative maintenance and pro-active checking rather than waiting for things to fail and get reported.
As always, Japan is huge, and diverse, it's not all like that, but certainly a lot of it is.
> In Japan, citizens are required to take lost property to the Koban (police station). From there, it is either returned or stored at the Tokyo hub until claimed.
A few years ago, I found a wallet on the ground and I took it to the police station. (The experience itself was a bit bizarre, they evidently had a "triage" system where you have to use a computer to select why you're there and get a ticket number, then sit in a waiting room until you're called - mostly with people picking up their kids from the drunk tank - this was a sunday morning).
Anyway, the police officer that eventually received me told me that they don't accept lost wallets, and that basically I was on my own if I wanted to figure out how to return it. (There was stuff with the person's name but no address in the wallet).
The only other time I was at a police station was when my car was stolen 20 years ago, and it was very different, with an actual receptionist and a place you could sit down and talk to an officer.
I noticed a purse left unattended at the bus stop. I saw a bus in the distance, and assumed the owner of the purse was on it.
I called the main number for the nearest police station (at least, the one listed in Google Maps). Around 15 minutes later, an officer arrived, checked the purse, and found a wallet. After getting information from me (any idea whose it was, did I touch it, etc.), the officer took it to the station’s lost-and-found.
Do sociologists yet understand why some cultures are strong in morality yet some aren’t? Surely if we understood the forces that drive macro behavior we could duplicate desirable attributes like high morality in other cultures. I would really like it if we had this high level of morality in America.
It helps explain why we in Japan can have nice things.
Fair enough but this just kicks the can down the road. Why does Japanese culture have a propensity to follow rules? How can we duplicate that in America?
Also, the concept of "Japanese people" was invented in the Meiji era as part of their approach to resisting Western colonization by pretending to already be a Western nation-state.
And of course, some of them are Ainu or Ryukyuan.
I hope this was just an isolated case.
German youth is also tought morality but not sure it always sticks.
The honesty system works on mutual trust
Security cameras are also plentiful and we'll staffed.
It feels good to call this a matter of morals but incentivizing return and fear of being caught by a camera are not quite morals, but on the bright side would be more easy to reproduce in other countries given interest.
Singapore would be an even greater extreme. I remember a friend telling me he was seated at a restaurant table, and two girls on the table next to him go out to smoke outside. The waiter came back to give back the credit card to the girls and found their table empty. The waiter then proceeded to give the credit card to my friend and told him to hand it back to the girls when they come back from smoking. The waiter apparently considered absurd the possibility of my friend keeping the card for himself and leaving.
I understand they have a tough immigration system.
Short of getting a job there, how can a US citizen live there?
It's a joke (in a good way) compared to other developed nations, the whole process costs $50 or so.
> Short of getting a job there, how can a US citizen live there?
Be in the military, get posted to the Japanese office of your company, get married to a Japanese, or have a stack of cash
The main issue for Americans is that wages are lower, might not be able to pay student loans or save up for that house.