He Collects the Little Oval You Tear Off Tissue Boxes. There Is No Reason.

What's going on

Open a box of tissues in Japan and the first thing you do is tear a small printed oval off the top — a perforated piece of card sitting over the plastic film, sized roughly to a thumb. Every brand prints its own design on it. Almost nobody looks at it. It goes in the bin about half a second after it comes off the box.

One person did not throw them away. They photographed several dozen of these ovals fanned out across a desk, an assortment of colors and patterns, and captioned it with the flattest possible admission: this is the part of tissue boxes they collect, and there is no reason. The first reply was a remark about the quantity being wrong. It went downhill from there.

What followed was less mockery than a chain reaction of confessions. Bread bag clips. Ice cream tubs. Soy sauce dishes from delivery sushi. The strips of card from packs of processed cheese. It emerged that a great many people are quietly maintaining a hoard of one specific piece of packaging, and not one of them can say why.