Social trust in Japan is so high that people will often leave their cellphone to hold their table while they get food or use the bathroom (photo from Tokyo Disneyland)

Try that with your umbrella 

I live in Japan and this is real.

Its hard when I travel overseas and have to remind myself to stop doing stuff like this.

Gee I wonder why.

Wait a minute. Are other countries really so bad that this is considered interesting as fuck? This is very common practice in Austria, just this weekend my friend and I “reserved” our breakfast table with our phones at a hotel in Vienna on both days. If not phone, then Portemonnaie or bag. This practice is so engraved in my habits, until now I never even thought about it twice. I realise now that I live in quite the bubble.

I think it’s the same in Singapore, though I will never leave my valuable items no matter how safe a country is.

Maybe not always the best option, not because someone will “steal” it, but seeing a phone unattended for even a short while, they will submit it to the police.

A friend once kept her purse on a table to get food, and it took a while. Turns out it had already been submitted to mall security, and I had to spend 10-15 mins filling out forms to get them back.

Ofcourse better than being stolen, but still an inconvenience.

You can do this in some USA cities still

Can relate!

Friday night, Osaka dotonbori district, pouring rain, get back to the guesthouse and realize I left my phone at a teppanyaki bar. We picked the bar because we were hungry and wandering and the rain started, never looked at the sign and could only recognize the bar by the way it looked

After retracing my steps for an hour we find it, the bar is closing but when I came in the entire staff started cheering for me and had my phone ready

I think they could tell that this was a gaijins phone from my wallpaper and from the sense of relief on my face when I got there they knew it was mine. They even charged it for me!

I have one of those stupid wallets attached to my phone which had cash money and cards and ids, all infact. I’ll never forget the way they cheered for me!

It’s the Same in South Korea. People leave there things everywhere and people don’t steal, it’s how it should be everywhere.

I won’t even leave coins visible in the cup holder of my car in the US. People will break your window for coins in some places here.

While living in Japan, I left my wallet, phone and everything in my pockets on my desk and left it there daily. Not a single worry. It was a nice few years working in Japan.

Contrast that with living in Colombia and traveling in Latin America. I’d need to sneak into a store or get away from the street to use my phone. I’d only carry one credit card if going out just in case I got robbed. I’d keep some money in my shoes just in case I got robbed and needed cab fare home.

Japan needs diversity!

As a tourist from a third world shithole, it was a culture-shock.

I once left my hotel key card in my room and went to the lobby to ask for help, and the staff just… accompanied me to my room and open it without asking any questions or verifying it was me.

Uhm- my son lives in Japan and someone stole his bike seat off of his mountain bike. Had to ride his bike back to the apartment without a seat

This is something that fascinates me.

How is this achieved? With education? Less poverty so people don’t have the need to steal? More harsh consequences (like damaging your family’s honor)? More chances of getting caught and punished because of a better police system?

I really want this for society (don’t we all) but I can’t really understand why some countries have it and some not.

You might assume that in a first world country you could do this and nothing will happen, but actually there’s a big chance of your phone being stolen, why? what’s the difference?

I know some people would make some racist comment about Japan being against immigration or something and sure that’s the low hanging fruit of this discussion but apart from that (if it’s even relevant) how the hell do they actually achieve this? I see people saying than it’s similar in other countries like Germany or maybe Denmark, why is that?

high-trust societies. a lot of people don’t even know they have a problem of a low-trust society simply because it always was the case for them that they’d eg. expect unattended things to be stolen.

This has nothing to do with social trust. I
The key factor is how desperate the poorest people in that society are. If you live in a country where large numbers of people are actively starving, and a cell phone can feed their family for months (and represents months of wages) , there’s a strong temptation to steal it.

A distant second factor is how effective law enforcement is. Specifically, if the police are too overworked to pursue minor crimes.

I live in the U.S. and do this all the time and it’s fine.

Here for the comments before it’s locked

Same thing for Taiwan. No one steals your iPhone, because they probably have a newer model 😂

My daughter spent nine months in a hospital in Japan and my wife left her cell phone in the bathroom no less than three times. It was always returned to a nurses station promptly when found every single time.