If you've ever wondered if those stories of people losing their wallets and then getting them back completely intact in Japan are actually true, I've got good news: I can confirm that as of the last 24 hours that is indeed the case! 
For reasons I'm still struggling to fathom, I somehow managed to lose it while biking around for some evening errands last night and by the time I had reported it to the local koban (also a first for me; I don't exactly make a habit of talking to police in this country as an expat!), somebody had already turned it in at another one and I was able to pick it up from the local precinct this afternoon all of about 15 hours later.
This area not being particularly bustling and especially not with tourists, rationally, I was pretty optimistic it would turn up before long, but considering my wallet has, y'know, my credit cards and especially my Japanese ID, I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little stressed out regardless, especially going up to the cops without that ID in particular, which you're legally supposed to have on you at all times as a foreigner when you're in public. But thankfully everybody in the process was all good sports and didn't chew me out, which, hey, I'll take it. đ©
All that said, for as much as my perfectionist side sometimes beats myself up for not having S-tier perfect, native level speaking and listening skillsâwhich have markedly improved since I moved back here regardlessâit was all yet another reminder of just how much at least being functional in this language goes a long way to navigating these sorts of interactions in Japan. I've never been to this country without speaking and reading at least a little bit of the language and in this area especially where fellow foreigners are relatively far and few between (I go a lot of weeks without seeing any other westerners around here), it's difficult for me to imagine how I would have even navigated this or countless other situations since moving here if I only spoke English. It's not to fault anyone on the other end of these interactions, but from the reaction I often get when people first see me, it's clear that they're not really trained to expect people like me to walk in, which speaks volumes about how ready lots of areas in this country are to really accommodate non-Japanese speaking long-term residents, which will only grow in number as time goes on because of the ongoing labor crunch.
There's no real moral to this or anything; I just find myself thinking about these things a lot when I run into mini-crises like that that get resolved favorably seemingly in part because my simply being proficient in Japanese helped grease some wheels in ways that I suspect would be less so if I wasn't able to bridge that gap myself. Which I guess is to say, even if your spoken Japanese ain't perfect, either, be grateful for what you have because you're probably more capable of saving your own butt with it than you might realize. 