On our recent trip to Japan (I know it is becoming irritating! But bear with me; the trip has ended and so will the blogs on Japan!)
So we realised that taxis are very expensive in Japan! So after spending a couple of days burning our money we got sufficient information and courage to try the underground metro! It was a revelation but this blog is not about that!
It is about Honesty!
After the eight of us were hopping trains and shopping; we returned with shopping bags full and wallets almost empty!
Then suddenly my sis in law realised that she does not have the lifeline of the modern generation with her!
The mobile phone! My brother calmly told her, “do not worry, just remember where you kept it last and it will be there only! This is Japan!”
Sure enough after another train hopping they found the phone kept beside the ticket counter as she remembered!
A huge relief for all of us! I was also amazed at the confidence my brother had that it would be found!
In fact Japan is widely celebrated globally for having an exceptionally honest society, heavily backed by cultural norms of civic duty, high social trust, and low crime rates!
Lost wallets containing cash are frequently turned in intact, and lost belongings are often left untouched where their owners dropped them!
People rely on a collective community understanding that stealing or keeping lost items breaks public harmony.
In fact Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police regularly process millions of yen in lost cash returned by honest finders and citizens!
There was in fact a very famous study done all over the world called the LOST WALLET test!
The test was based on a massive global scientific study on civic honesty which tested lost wallet returns and other international corruption indices!
That study ranked Switzerland, Norway, and the Netherlands as the world’s most honest countries, closely followed by Nordic nations like Denmark, Sweden, and Finland!
The famous global field experiment tested honesty by dropping over 17,000 “lost” wallets across 355 cities in 40 countries.
The likelihood of people trying to return a lost wallet defined the civic honesty rankings! Even Japan has consistently ranked high in this and many other studies and tests on honesty!
So apart from the comfort and the technology; the one thing we were hardly worried about was theft! That is a great plus for international travel!
Then again coming back to Bharat is an amazing feeling since it is our own country! Which is why we love our food and movies more than anything else! Which reminds me of Pradeep Ram Singh Rawat; heartfelt condolences, he will be missed…
Om shanthi…
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