Americans leave the best things in Tokyo taxis. I know because my friend Okamura drives one. Twenty-eight years. And in Japan, whatever you leave in a cab comes back to you. Wallets. Phones. Envelopes of cash. Nobody has to enforce it. It's just what we do. Okamura has returned over two thousand lost items. He writes every one in a notebook. The Americans get their own page. He let me pick his top eight. 8. A cowboy hat. The owner came back for it forty minutes later. He had taken the train to six different stations looking for my friend's cab. When Okamura handed it to him, he hugged it like a puppy and said, "I've lost two wives. Never this hat." His third wife was standing right next to him. She did not laugh. Okamura did, and regrets it. 7. Half a sandwich. Wrapped carefully in a napkin. On the napkin, in pen: "FOR THE DRIVER. IT'S GOOD. I CHECKED." It was good. He returned the napkin. 6. A pacifier. Five minutes after the drop-off, a father came sprinting down the street after the cab. Full speed. Arms pumping. Okamura says he has never seen a man run like that. He was not running for a pacifier. He was running for the next six hours of his life. 5. Upper dentures. In a napkin. Okamura found them at a red light and almost had a heart attack. The owner was 81, from Georgia, and laughed so hard when he got them back that he had to lower himself onto the curb. Then he put them in, right there, smiled with all of them, and said, "Son, you just saved my steak dinner." 4. A phone with eleven hundred photos of grandkids. When Okamura returned it, the grandfather asked if he'd looked. Okamura admitted he had. The grandfather asked which grandkid was the cutest. Okamura pointed at one. The grandfather squinted at the photo forever and said, "Wrong. But I'll allow it." That grandkid is now known in a family in Ohio as "the one the Japanese guy picked." She's six. She mentions it at every holiday. 3. A Bible. Forty years of handwritten notes in the margins. A pastor from Alabama. When he got it back, he cried a little. Then he opened the front cover, where there's a list he's been keeping since 1986 called "People to Pray For," and wrote at the bottom: "Mr. Okamura, Tokyo. Taxi." Okamura is not Christian. He says he can feel it anyway. On bad nights, he says, it helps. 2. An engagement ring. Still in the box. The man came back white as rice, twenty minutes before his reservation. Okamura drove him to the restaurant with the meter off and waited outside. She said yes. The man came running out to the sidewalk and hugged him. They sent him a Christmas card from Kentucky. Two years in a row now. This year there's a baby on it. 1. A leg. Last summer, at about 11 p.m., a very large American with a very short haircut got out of Okamura's cab at a hotel in Shinjuku. Okamura noticed the thing on the back seat two hours later, as his shift ended. It was a prosthetic leg. Not a regular one. A sports leg. Carbon fiber. Built for climbing. There was a sticker on it. An eagle, a globe, and an anchor. Okamura couldn't read it. He could tell it mattered. He drove back to the hotel. The man had checked out at 3 a.m. He'd joined a group of disabled American veterans on a bus to climb Mount Fuji. They were starting from the trailhead at sunrise. Okamura looked at the leg. He looked at his gas gauge. Twenty-eight years, and not one lost item had ever made him drive out of Tokyo. Umbrellas wait. Wallets wait. They go to the police box and the owner picks them up the next day. I asked him why this one couldn't wait. "A man who already gave one leg," he said, "should not climb Japan's mountain on the wrong one." So he drove two and a half hours through the dark, off the clock, to the fifth station of Mount Fuji, with a stranger's leg buckled into his passenger seat. He says he buckled it in. He says it felt rude not to. He got there as the sky was turning gray. Eleven veterans were stretching in the parking lot. Two in wheelchairs. One with no arms below the elbow. One who had brought his service dog up a mountain, and the dog seemed fine with it. The man from his cab was getting ready to climb on his everyday leg, a walking leg, the wrong one for a mountain, because, as he explained later, "Marines adapt." Okamura walked up and held out the climbing leg the way you'd offer someone a sword. The Marine stared at it. Then at Okamura. Then at it again. Then he started laughing. A huge laugh. The whole group turned around. "Sir," he said, "I lost a leg in Helmand in 2011. You are the first person to ever bring one back." The other ten figured out what had happened. Nobody gave an order. Nobody said a word. At sunrise, on the side of Mount Fuji, eleven American veterans came to attention. The two in wheelchairs sat up as straight as they could. The dog sat too. For a taxi driver. Okamura had no idea how you answer that. So he bowed. Deep. Longer than he meant to. He says it was because he didn't want them to see his face. Then the Marine dropped onto a rock, put on his leg, stood up, shook Okamura's hand, typed his number into Okamura's phone, and climbed Mount Fuji. Okamura slept in his cab in the parking lot. That afternoon, a photo came in. Eleven veterans on the summit of Mount Fuji, above the clouds. Two wheelchairs that had been carried up by everyone else. One dog. Front and center, a big man sticking one carbon-fiber leg straight out toward the camera. Under it, a text: "YOUR LEG GOT TO THE TOP FIRST. SEMPER FI, BROTHER." It's taped to his dashboard now. Okamura has picked up exactly two words since then that aren't Japanese. He thinks they're English. They're Latin. Nobody has volunteered to break it to him. When an American gets into his cab now, especially a big one with a short haircut, he looks in the mirror and says them. "Semper Fi." He tells me about half of them cry. The other half say it back.