I was in Tokyo to the emperors new years speach and we got two Japanese plastic flags to wave around that we could keep after the event. We walked a bit in the

I was in Tokyo to the emperors new years speach and we got two Japanese plastic flags to wave around that we could keep after the event. We walked a bit in the city and my spouse wanted to take pictures of me in a park. She put the flags on the ground for a minute (with me thinking: you can't do that!) and went tops 30m away from them to get a better angle. When we were done, they were gone. I'm actually certain they were not stolen, but some Japanese just cleaned up. In general, the collective effort of the Japanese to keep their cities clean with basically no public bins around is amazing.