MEANWHILE, in Tokyo...
Lost: Struggling to cope with millions of unclaimed items in Tokyo
Among the millions of items that were registered with Tokyo’s lost and found center last year was an urn containing someone’s ashes.
And yet this should perhaps not surprise you — urns are handed in to lost and found centers more regularly than you might think. Last year alone, the Metropolitan Police Department’s lost and found center in Bunkyo Ward tried to reunite as many as 10 urns with their owners. In every case, relatives of the deceased refused to come and collect them.
Umbrellas are one of the most common items that accumulate at the center, so much so that a 660-square-meter room has been dedicated to storing them in the basement. The room wasn’t quite full as of late April but Shoji Okubo, head of the center, says that this situation will change once the rainy season starts in June.
Okubo says that roughly 3,000 umbrellas are found in Tokyo on a typical rainy day. In 2016, the metropolitan police handled a total of 381,135 umbrellas across the entire year.
Each umbrella is fitted with a tag that lists detailed information on when and where it was found. It is then stored according to the date it was handed in and the rail operators that logged it.
“It’s really hard for us to store items in a systematic way so that they can be found easily when a person comes in to claim something,” Okubo says.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2017/05/27/lifestyle/lost-struggling-cope-millions-unclaimed-items-tokyo/#.WTWYq9wpBhG
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