Anywhere else perhaps, a shiny cellphone fallen on the backseat of a taxi, a nondescript umbrella left leaning against a subway door, a wad of cash dropped on a sidewalk, would be lost forever, the owners resigned to the vicissitudes of big city life.

But here in Tokyo, with 8 million people in the city and 33 million in the metropolitan area, these items and thousands more would probably find their way to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Lost and Found Center. In a four-story warehouse, hundreds of thousands of lost objects are meticulously catalogued according to the date and location of discovery, and the information put in a database.

Smaller lost-and-found centers exist all over Japan, based on a 1,300-year-old system that long preceded Japan's unification as a nation and its urbanization. More recently, it has apparently survived an economic slump that has contributed to the general rise in crime.

Consider that in 2002 people found and brought to the Tokyo center $23 million in cash, 72 percent of which was returned to the owners, once they had persuaded the police it was theirs. About 19 percent of it went to the finders after no one claimed the money for half a year.