---
title: Japan's Relationship With Honesty 
description: For most people, losing a wallet is more than an inconvenience. It means cancelling cards, changing locks, and hours spent without a way to pay for anything....
date: 2026-08-24T09:30:00.000Z
updated: 2026-08-24T09:35:11.264Z
canonical: https://richwoman.co/article/japan-s-relationship-with-honesty
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/caption - 2026-08-24T034119.180.jpg
categories: Culture & Society
content_type: Opinion
region: Japan
publication: Rich Woman Magazine
access: members
schema_type: Article
---

For most people, losing a wallet or purse is more than an inconvenience. Smartphones now let us pay contactlessly, hold our travel cards and find our way home, yet there is still something reassuringly solid about physical ID and bank cards in your pocket. Misplacing your wallet does not just leave you without a way of paying for a few hours. It can mean cancelling every card you own and, if your keys were in there too, changing the locks on your house. There is one city, though, where you are disproportionately likely to see your belongings again. Tokyo.

## What actually happens when you lose something in Tokyo

The BBC has reported that 83 per cent of mobile phones lost in Tokyo are returned to their owners, often the same day. Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Lost & Found Centre takes in an average of around 9,000 items a day from local koban, the small neighbourhood police boxes that sit on street corners across the city, plus another 7,000 daily from the operators of central Tokyo's railways. In 2022 alone, Tokyo residents handed in a record ¥3.99 billion in lost cash, more than £24 million, an average of over £67,000 every single day. Of the 3.43 million individual items logged that year, more than 700,000 were driving licences or ID cards, nearly 400,000 were transit cards, and roughly 300,000 were wallets.

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