Photo/Illutration The Metropolitan Police Department’s center for lost items in Tokyo’s Bunkyo Ward in April 2019 (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The National Police Agency plans to develop an online database of items found and handed in to officers by citizens to allow people nationwide to search for lost belongings.

The agency said Nov. 10 it is working on a comprehensive system that will display all items brought to police stations across Japan.

While such information is currently managed separately by prefectural police authorities, the plan calls for integrating the networks into a single system over the course of five years from this fiscal year.

As a first step, the new mechanism will be started in 10 prefectures--Niigata, Kyoto, Nagasaki, Aomori, Nagano, Fukui, Nara, Tottori, Okayama and Oita--at the end of this fiscal year.

It will necessitate a revision to rules governing the National Public Safety Commission. The NPA began soliciting opinions on the new system from the public for a one-month period from Nov. 11.

In the future, police officials who take receipt of items handed in by the public will register them on the nationwide database at police stations and “koban” boxes. People seeking to retrieve lost objects will be able to peruse the NPA’s specialized website for the types and locations of articles handed in.

The current framework only lists the data by prefecture, which can make searching for a lost item a cumbersome process.

Reports on lost items can now be submitted via the internet to police only in Tokyo, Hokkaido and the seven prefectures of Ibaraki, Saitama, Kanagawa, Yamanashi, Ishikawa, Mie and Yamaguchi. The online service will be expanded to cover all regions throughout the country.

The practice of officers developing and keeping paper lists of articles handed in will be abolished once the lists are fully digitized.

There were 17 million cases of items being handed in to police last year, and 3.5 million reports on lost articles were received.

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