Many might know that, in Japan, if you report found items to police and the owner doesn’t show up for 3 months, the ownership of the item passes to the founder. Even if the owner shows up, the founder has the right to demand 謝礼 (gift) of 5 ~ 20% of the item’s value according to the law.
What I found interesting in this case is that multiple parties showed up and claimed they “might” be the owner, but the police still gave it to the founder.
It makes one wonder:
- Who loses 18,000,000 yen of cash (~114k USD) and was not sure about it?
- Are any of the claimed owner legit and he/she just wasn’t able to prove it to the police?
- Do people lose cash so often that it happens to multiple parties at the same time?
- Or are the other parties making false claims? In that case they are pretty bold since they have to make them to the police.
Japan is a heavily cash based society so large sums are definitely more common. May have been a senior or someone getting scammed and don’t want to admit it.
Yeah, when I lived there, I would pretty casually walk around with upwards of the equivalent of a thousand USD pretty commonly. Wouldn’t bat an eye at taking more if I thought I was going to spend a lot.
I’d usually keep 20-40,000 ¥ on me when I first got to Japan in the 90s. I remember arriving at Narita and just planning on hitting an ATM to get cash because I didn’t have any money on me, just cards. Oops.
Now most places take credit cards snd tap so much easier.
I was there in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. The prices then weren’t a lot higher than they were in the '90s. Still, I usually had the equivalent of between $400 and $600 on me at any given time. But they didn’t really accept cards back then. I visited a few years ago and was surprised by how many places took cards. Of course, most still didn’t, so I’d be walking around with a ton of cash.