Japanese Honesty

One of the admirable qualities of the Japanese is their honesty especially when it comes to finding lost items. As an example, I have frequently seen a Japanese person walking along and find some small personal token on the sidewalk. They’ll pick the item up and then try and place it somewhere on the edge of the sidewalk, preferably off the ground, where the person who lost it can find it again. I’ve seen umbrellas, scarves, hats and gloves on the edges of sidewalks just waiting for their owners to reclaim them.

Here’s another good example that will really hammer home the point. The smallest Japanese bill is a 1000 Yen note worth approximately US $10. Any denominations smaller than the 1000 Yen note come in the form of coins: 500 Yen ($5), 100 Yen ($1), 50 Yen etc etc. Because it’s pretty easy to accumulate change over here, it’s noisy carrying them in your pants pockets. I’ve found that when I do that and walk, all I hear is “kaching, kaching, kaching”. It sounds like I’m wearing spurs and since many foreign countries consider Americans as “cowboys” anyway, I try to avoid the stereotype and usually carry my change in my shirt pocket. So recently I had a 500 Yen coin in my shirt pocket and while I was retrieving change for the vending machine in our break room, I accidently dropped the 500 Yen coin on the floor. I thought I heard a coin drop and looked on the floor but didn’t see it so I shrugged it off and went on my merry way. A couple hours later when we were at lunch, my part of the bill was 800 Yen. I knew, or at least thought I knew, that I had a 500 Yen coin as well as a couple of 100 Yen coins in my pocket to pay for the bill. Nope. No 500 Yen coin in the pocket. I knew right than that I did drop the 500 Yen coin in the break room.
It may have only been $5 but I was still PO’d all the same mainly because I heard the coin drop and didn’t take the time to really look for it. However, when we got back to the office I happened to walk past the break room and, lo and behold, there on top of a file cabinet right outside the break room was my 500 Yen coin. Think about that for a second. First, one of my Japanese co-workers found the coin and didn’t bother to pocket it. He or she then placed the coin on top of the file cabinet in full view of the entire floor. There are probably about 50 people who work on that floor and someone goes by that cabinet every few minutes to the break room. Yet no one bothered to pocket the coin because it wasn’t theirs. In my home office, I could drop a $5 bill in front of my co-workers and not only would they insist it was theirs but they’d probably shank me for it.