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交番 — the police box on the corner
A 交番 is a staffed police post, usually two or three officers, covering a few streets from a small building you can walk into. There are over six thousand of them, and they are the reason a lost wallet in Japan is usually a solvable problem rather than a loss: finders hand things in, the 交番 logs them, and a legal share of the value can be claimed by whoever brought it. Tokyo's lost-and-found center takes in over three million items a year and returns a large fraction of the cash. The 交番 is also where you go for directions, which is why its officers spend a measurable part of their shift with a map.