It is a rainy Wednesday. I am at Nagoya City Hall, frustrated and soaked after a day of searching, wondering whether it’s even worth it to go to the police station.
I wish I could say that an exciting tale led me to such a predicament. Like if I had been caught jaywalking (no one, absolutely no one, jaywalks in Japan), or had been bold enough to walk around without my Alien Registration Card (which all foreigners must have on them at all times), and was on the verge of deep deep trouble. But unfortunately, life in Japan is not as bizarre as a Kill Bill movie every day.
I’ll give you the disappointing truth: I am on a journey for a lost pair of shoes. At this moment in City Hall, I am pondering how much I want the shoes back, and if I want them enough to go for another round of broken-Japanese 101 (spoken by yours truly) at the police station.
My story starts three Fridays ago, when I decided to be a normal college student and go out for a night on the town.
In my intense vanity, I decided that four-inch platform heels would be the perfect addition to my night. Never mind that my feet were screaming bloody-murder at me after 10 minutes—or the fact that the average height in Japan is about 10 inches below that in America.
Yet even in my idiocy, I decided to be smart, as I knew that sometime later I would regret wearing those heels. So I tucked my flip-flops into my handbag, and went off into the night.
A few short hours later, I found myself coming to from the dizzying sensations that were my Friday night on the town. I was at the bus stop near my host family’s house, and realized I was in flip-flops with my heels nowhere in sight.
When I woke up the next day, regret set in and I began to lament my lost pair of gorgeous, wonderful heels (despite the blisters on my feet). To my pleasant surprise, a simple Google search of “Japan lost and found” led me to a hidden treasure chest of information.
Somehow, Japan’s 1,300 year-old code about how lost property should be handled has survived to modern times. In Japan today, this moral code translates into numerous lost-and-found centers all over Japan where items are constantly being turned in—and claimed. If the original owner doesn’t pick up the item within six months, the item can be reclaimed by the person who found it; if not claimed at all, the item becomes the possession of the government after a year.
For me, this was probably the most glorious news I could have possibly received. After more searching online led me to near-fantastical tales of people recovering lost iPhones and checkbooks, and kind souls returning millions of yen in cash to lost and found centers, I became pretty confident that my shoes were about to come floating back into my room in no time. No way they were lost—they were definitely sitting in the Transportation Bureau’s Lost and Found Office.
Best of all, I found that the city of Nagoya offered an English-calling service for situations such as mine. I could explain my circumstances to an interpreter, and we would then conference call the Transportation Bureau about my shoes. After deciding on a simple explanation for my predicament (“I can’t remember if I misplaced my shoes in the station or the subway”), I dialed away.
About five minutes into the phone conversation with my “interpreter,” I realized that her English abilities were about as questionable as my Japanese. As I sat and listened to her mistranslate “polka-dot” to “white” to the worker at the Transportation Bureau, I realized I wasn’t going to be satisfied with any answer she gave me.
To my chagrin, the conversation ended with no shoes found, and instead the interpreter lady advised me to file a police report. After taking in the incredulity of her suggestion, I decided to simply go to the lost and found center at City Hall and look for myself.
And so, there I was on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, talking to an elderly man behind a glass panel in a tiny corner of the second floor of City Hall. Behind him stood shelves piled high with purses, shopping bags, and other random items—and beyond the shelves were huge cardboard boxes, all precisely dated. The old man recorded the description of my shoe, and proceeded to dig through a cardboard box about nearly his size—only to come away empty-handed. My encounter ended with a recommendation from the old man to visit the police station, accompanied by meticulous directions on how to get there, right down to exactly how many meters I should walk.
Although my adventure seemed useless by the end, I learned a lot of lessons along the way. Don’t go drinking in four-inch heels, don’t trust free interpreter services and don’t go to anybody but the Japanese police for the solution to your life problems.
My solution? I went shopping the weekend after, and bought a new pair of flats.
Lisa Du is a Trinity junior. Her column runs every other Friday.
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