TO THE citizens of more lawless countries Japan’s low crime rates and high standards of personal honesty are a cause of envious admiration. But now Japanese are paying the price for their integrity as the country sinks beneath a mountain of lost property.

Japan’s Cabinet has approved legislation to reduce the millions of items — from trillions of yen in cash, to live hamsters and packets of chewing gum — lost in shops and on public transport and conscientiously handed in by their finders. The change will ease the burden on the vast lost property centres where millions of lost items — most of which will never reach their owners — are documented and stored every year.

The Japanese are a forgetful people: in 2004, 7.4 million items were reported lost. An even larger number of objects was handed in — 10.7 million; three and a half times the annual number when records began 50 years ago.

Among them were 330,000 mobile phones, 730,000 wallets, and 13.2 billion yen (£66 million) in cash, most of which were successfully returned to their owners. But they also included 1.4 million umbrellas and 876,000 small items of clothing, such as scarves and gloves, only a fraction of which are ever returned.

Technically anyone who fails to hand in lost property in Japan can be convicted of embezzlement. Those who do are rewarded with 10 per cent of a lost object’s value if it is reclaimed, and can keep their find if it is not.

Perhaps because of this strict legal framework definitions of what constitutes lost property have become very wide indeed. “Sometimes, schoolchildren hand over a few sweets that they’ve found on the train,” said Kazuo Yamazaki of the Lost Property Centre in Ueno railway station in Tokyo. “Now to you that may be litter but to the owner it could be lost property.”

The revisions to the 107-year-old Lost Goods Law will reduce from six to three months the length of time that lost property must be kept before it is handed over to the finder. The police will be allowed to sell low-value items such as umbrellas, 99 per cent of which remain unclaimed, to recoup the cost of storing them.

An online database will be set up to allow people to search for their property without visiting many police stations and lost property offices.

The changes will also remove the anomalous regulation that defines pets as lost property. In the past lost and found offices have had to feed and tend to dogs, cats, goldfish, hamsters and even snakes and wallabies. Some of them keep pet food on hand, just in case. Happily, though, 83 per cent of the 34,500 lost animals handed in during 2004 were returned to their owners.

The most frequently lost items are umbrellas, which make up 16 per cent of the total items — a heavy rainstorm can generate 3,000 in Tokyo alone. Then comes money, according to figures provided by the National Police Agency, followed by small items of clothing, wallets and documents. Three quarters of mobile phones are restored to their owners, who can be traced easily through the telephone companies.

Distressingly common are funerary urns. “We get a few a year,” Mr Yamazaki said. “I don’t think people leave them deliberately, but they sit on the train, they’re upset, and they just forget [them]. We’ve had futon mattresses and shop mannequins. And crutches — it makes you wonder how the person managed to walk home.”

So efficient is the lost property system that some absent-minded Japanese are lulled into a false sense of security. In 2004, 24-year-old Kogoro Nishi went to the police to report the loss of a knapsack and was promptly arrested.

He had indeed left the bag behind — in the house of an old lady whom he had just robbed at knife point.

HONESTY PAYS

An American university professor dropped mobile phones and wallets containing cash in Tokyo and New York. The return rate in Japan was higher although the professor concludes that Japanese are not intrinsically more “honest” but there are clear rules and rewards

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