Life In Japan: A Lost Wallet

Every year in October, we have here in Sasayama — my hometown — the Festival of the Portable Shrines.  It’s one of my favorites!

It coincides with the black bean harvest.  Soybeans are called black beans because if they are left on the vine, they turn black and harden, making them easy to store and use over the coming year.

The town is famous over much of Japan for the quality of its black beans.  This means that the weekend of the festival, Sasayama is flooded with tourists.

A gentleman arrived here from Kobe, which is about an hour away.  He came to purchase black beans, but when the moment came to pay, he discovered his wallet was missing. 

There are no pickpockets here, so obviously he had dropped it somewhere in town.

He went to the nearest Koban.  There are many here in Sasayama, as there are all over Japan.  A Koban is a mini-police station.  In the U.S. there is much lip service given to community policing, having friendly cops in the neighborhood to address problems which come up in the local area.  In Japan, it’s a reality and an integral part of a functioning community.

The policeman on duty — considering Kobans are, despite being extremely useful and efficient, very limited affairs, often just a two-room building with one parking space for a patrol car, there was probably only one or at the most two officers there — took a report, then got on the phone.  He called all the other Kobans in the immediate area, anywhere close to where the gentleman had parked his car, then walked into the main part of town.

He passed along the man’s name and a description of the wallet.

Now get this . . .

While he was on the phone with another Koban, someone walked in with the wallet and handed it to the policeman on duty there.

The gentleman from Kobe walked the short distance to the other Koban, and retrieved his wallet.  The contents — credit cards, ID, cash — were intact.  Not a single item had been stolen.

I’m not going to moralize.  Draw your own conclusions.  Imagine dropping your wallet wherever you live and decide how the story would have ended.

I’ll say it again . . . I love Japan!