Danish soccer player has been winning fans in Japan, and he’s become a big fan of Japan too.

Danish professional soccer player Kasper Junker spent the early years of his career playing for teams in Denmark and Norway. Since the spring of 2021, though, he’s been playing for the Urawa Red Diamonds, a J1 League team based in Japan’s Saitama Prefecture.

Junker had a solid first season, with 16 goals putting him not all that far behind the league leaders’ 23. However, his first year in Japan wasn’t all smooth sailing. In September of 2021, five months after arriving in the country, Junker accidently left his AirPods in a taxi. Apparently assuming they were gone for good, Junker seems to have put the aggravating accident behind himself, until last Friday when he was once again taking a cab ride, and something incredible happened.

“Eight months ago, I lost my AirPods in a taxi,” tweets Kasper. “Today, by chance, I got into the same taxi. The driver has been hanging on to them for me for this whole time, and he returned them to me. I love Japan.”

Japan has a well-deserved reputation for excellent customer service, but this is an especially amazing example. First, while some commenters wondered why the driver didn’t turn the AirPods in to the police, the fact that he returned them to Kasper at the first opportunity shows he wasn’t trying to keep them for himself. It also suggests that Kasper had figured trying to recover them was a lost cause and didn’t contact the taxi company to ask if anyone had found them, so it’s unlikely he contacted the police either. What’s more, other commenters pointed out that in cases like this the police will only hold on to found property for six months or so, after which it’s given to the person who found it to do whatever they want with it, so it’s possible the driver did turn the AirPods in to the police, then became their caretaker after no one else came forward to claim them.

But that’s not the most impressive thing. The Urawa Red Diamonds are a major professional sports organization, and driving to the stadium and telling a customer service staff member “Hey, I’m here to return Kasper Junker’s AirPods” wouldn’t have been hard to do.

So let’s put these pieces together:
● The driver didn’t want to keep the AirPods for himself.
● He wanted to return them to their owner.
● He didn’t take them to the team’s stadium or offices.

The only explanation is that even though the driver remembered and recognized Junker, he didn’t know he was Kasper Junker, professional soccer player for the Urawa Red Diamonds. He didn’t resist the temptation to pocket or sell the AirPods because he expected free tickets from the team or some signed swag from Junker as a reward. To the driver, Junker was just someone who’d unfortunately left something in his cab, and his actions show it’s safe to assume he’d have done the same for anyone who’d ridden in his cab.

Source: Twitter/@KasperJunker
Top image © SoraNews24
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