Japan police seek owners of lost safes

OFUNATO, Japan -- There are no cars in the parking garage at Ofunato police headquarters. Instead, hundreds of dented metal safes, swept out of homes and businesses by last month's tsunami, crowd the long rectangular building.

Any one of them could hold someone's life savings.

Safes are washing up along the tsunami-battered coast, and police are trying to find their owners, a unique problem in a country where many people, especially the elderly, still stash their cash at home. By one estimate, some $350 billion worth of yen is not in circulation.

There's even a term for this hidden money, "tansu yokin" or, literally, "wardrobe savings." So the post-tsunami cleanup under way along hundreds of miles of the ravaged northeastern coast involves the delicate business of separating junk from valuables. As they pick through the wreckage, workers and residents are increasingly stumbling upon cash and locked safes.

"At first we put all the safes in the station," said Noriyoshi Goto, head of the Ofunato Police financial affairs department, in charge of lost-and-found items. "But then there were too many, so we had to move them." He said his department has collected "several hundred" safes, with more coming in every day.

Identifying the owners of lost safes is hard enough. But it's nearly impossible when it comes to wads of cash being found in envelopes, unmarked bags, boxes and furniture.

Yasuo Kimura, 67, considers himself lucky. The tsunami swallowed and gutted his home in Onagawa, about 50 miles south of Ofunato. He escaped with his 90-year-old father and the clothes on his back. But he still has money in the bank.

That's not the case for many of his longtime friends and acquaintances, said Kimura, a former bank employee.

"I spent my career trying to persuade them to deposit their money in a bank," he said, staring out at his flattened city. "They always thought it was safer to keep it at home."

The number of safes that have turned up in Ofunato alone is a reflection of the area's population: In Iwate prefecture where this fishing town is located, nearly 30 percent of the population is over 65.

As in Iwate, local police stations in Miyagi are reporting "very high numbers" of safes and cash being turned in.

"It's just how people have operated their entire lives," Koetsu Saiki of the Miyagi Prefectural Police financial affairs department said. "When they need money, they'd rather have their money close by. It's not necessarily that they don't trust banks. But there are a lot of people who don't feel comfortable using ATMs, especially the elderly."

The government has estimated that the cost of the earthquake and tsunami could reach $309 billion, making it the world's most expensive natural disaster on record. But the figure doesn't take into account individual losses from home-held cash washed away by waves.

With more than 25,000 people believed to have died, many safes could to go unclaimed.