Nine years ago, when Jem and I came to Japan for our honeymoon, we (of course) went to Disneyland. Jem bought a new Disney hat, and it promptly blew off on a ride. We went to lost and found, figuring, what the heck, we may as well see if anyone finds it. They didn’t find it that day, but we filled out all the forms with our address and phone number and figured oh well, it was just a hat. A few days after returning from Japan, Jem’s phone began ringing. It was Tokyo Disneyland, they had found his hat. We had a lot of difficulty understanding them over the phone, but we figured it didn’t really matter, there was no way they would ship a hat back to the U.S. Well, a few days later a DHL international package package arrived with his hat in it.
Since that moment, we knew Japan was a place where your belongings go out of their way to find their way home to you. A couple of times this summer, we got separated from the kids, at a park, in a store. Instead of panicking, we remembered that if Japan went to those lengths to return Jem’s hat, they would find our children and make sure they are returned to us. Of all the countries in the world, this is the one where we did not need to worry about where our kids were. They would find their way back to us.
We had two incidents this trip were we saw the Art of Finding Lost Objects unfold before us. The first was on our way to Okinawa from Tokyo when Amalia left her backpack full of her toys on the train to the airport. We realized it within a couple of minutes of getting off the train, and went back into the train to see where it was. It was not there. As we were debating when the last time was we saw it, a nice man came out of the train to tell us that it had been left in the train car and another passenger had taken it to the station master. Sure enough, when we got up to the station master, he had the stuffed animals and dresses for said stuffed animals out on his counter. I immediately pointed at it and us and Amalia and said “ours” … he spoke no English but understood. He handed me a form to fill out with a companion card in English spelling out what I was supposed to fill out where, asked for my passport and after the appropriate forms were completed, we had the backpack back with all the toys. That was on the early side of our trip.
Toward the end of the trip (our last night to be exact), I, silly distracted me, set my phone down on the seat next to me on the evening Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto. The train was on its way to Shin-Osaka, so the Kyoto stop was one stop before, and quite brief, about 1 minute to get everyone off the train. In all the scurrying, I left my phone on the seat. I realized it once we were on our way to the hotel. I went back to the station and asked the station attendant and he told me to go to Shin-Osaka in the morning (a city about 30 minutes away) and go to lost and found there.
So, the next morning, I got up hours before we needed to check out of the hotel. Our flight out of Kansai Airport was at 6 pm, so I had some time, but it was either the Shin-Osaka lost and found or bust. If they hadn’t found it, or maybe they found it later, there would be no time to get the phone delivered to me before we left Japan. And unlike Disney, Japan Rail was clear they did not send packages outside of Japan.
I set out from the hotel at 730 am. I caught an 8 am train to Shin-Osaka. At Shin-Osaka, I wandered across the entire station before finding this tiny office of Lost and Found. I was certain my phone would never be found again. I explained in very few English words “left phone on train” and showed my ticket with the train number, seat number and date. He told me to wait a moment and vanished in the back. And…yes, indeed, he returned 2 minutes later with my phone!! I had to put in the passcode in front of him, and fill out all the forms with my passport number, but I had my phone! Japan works exactly as it is supposed to. I had had a restless night worrying about it, but I did keep saying to Jem, “this is Japan. I am annoyed that I have to go to another city to get my phone, but I know that I have a 98% chance of getting it back.” I had my phone back by 8:35 am. In a weird way, finding my phone made me even sadder to be leaving Japan later that day.