Photo/Illutration The police station within Chubu Airport stores 'lost' suitcases. (Akihito Usui)

Have suitcase, will travel. Well, yes and no.

Abandoned luggage is becoming a growing problem at airports across Japan, posing a major security headache.

Passengers often decide to dump their suitcases after finding they exceed the measurements for carry-on luggage, according to airport staff.

This, in turn, places a huge burden on already taxed airport security officials and police as they try to ascertain whether there is any terrorist threat to deal with.

And local police stations are running out of room to store the suitcases, which are treated as lost items.

In July, Aichi prefectural police referred to prosecutors the case of a local man who left his suitcase near the entrance to the No. 2 terminal building of Chubu Airport in June with no intention of coming back for it.

According to airport officials, the thirtysomething man removed the contents of the case and repacked one used by another family member after finding out it was too big for carry-on bags.

This was the first case at Chubu Airport since its opening in 2005 of a passenger deliberately flouting the law on waste disposal.

Officials at Narita International Airport, Kansai International Airport and Chubu said the number of abandoned suitcases started to increase after Japan relaxed restrictions on entry imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, Narita Airport reported an increase in abandoned suitcases from 338 in fiscal 2021 to 1,073 in fiscal 2024. The figure for Chubu Airport was 22 to 85 during the same period.

Kansai Airport said a record 816 suitcases were dumped in fiscal 2024, up from 221 in fiscal 2021.

Unclaimed suitcases at airports are treated as suspicious items and police officers use X-ray to check for explosives. If the suitcase is found to not pose a danger, it is stored at the police station as a lost item.

It usually takes around three hours to confirm whether an abandoned suitcase is just that and nothing more. In most cases, the bag is empty.

One security scare in February involved a suspicious item wrapped in paper. Police officers had it X-rayed and determined the item was a pressure cooker similar to one used in the past by terrorists.

Police sealed off the area and opened the pressure cooker but found it empty.

It was also treated as a lost item.

Such cases place an unnecessary burden on the police, a high-ranking officer said.

Chubu has placed signs on garbage bins that say in English and Chinese that disposing suitcases is prohibited.

It also started a program in October of accepting unwanted suitcases for a fee of 1,200 yen ($8.20).

As of the end of June, the airport had collected 185 suitcases.

(This article was written by Akihito Usui, Yoshinobu Motegi and Akira Miyashita.)

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