I’m leaving Japan and would like to ship some thing back to my home country. If anyone has experience with this, I would like advice on the following:
1. Assuming I use JP post’s pickup service, what does it look like? For example, do I keep the boxes open to show the person what is inside before taping them up? If I use my own boxes, are there any restrictions on this (e.g. if it has another country’s logo?)
2. If I want to buy a box, do I just walk into JP post and ask for one?
3. How do you ship awkwardly shaped items home? (E.g. paintings, musical instruments)
4. What happens if you wrongly estimate the weight of the box?
Thanks in advance.
2 comments
Check with Kuroneko (Yamato Transport) and other shipping companies.
1. I did that last year. You have to sign up on the jp website and write down in detail what’s inside all the boxes. Be as detailed as possible. But I grouped things like clothes and kitchen supplies like so: used clothes 30x, kitchen supplies (bowls, chopsticks, etc) 30x (with the correct numbers obviously).
For value I always put 10 or so yen for everything because it was all used stuff and nothing of value. 0 is not possible.
The guy comes to your door with a scale, checks the size (VERY METICULOUSLY) and weight of the boxes, as well as the paper you printed from the website with what’s inside the box. He will ask things like “batteries? Sunscreen? Bleach?” Which are all forbidden. When you ship cosmetics add that there’s no sunscreen, when you ship anything that could potentially contain batteries add “no batteries” to the column. In my case at least he didn’t want to look inside. He just confirmed every sine item I write down. He read it like by line and if he wasn’t sure he asked. We communicated by Google translate, haha.
Make sure your boxes comply with your country’s regulations (weight, size)! As far as i remember some countries allow 300cm, some 200cm (the 3 dimensions added up). If they are even 1cm too big you’ll have to repack. Check on JPs website what your specific country accepts! I had huge boxes from work that I made smaller but one was still 1cm total too big when the guy arrived and measured. He was super nice and even had tape to help me make the box smaller.
2. Can’t answer that, sorry.
3. Cant answer that either, sorry. All I can say is: check if taking them on the plane as extra luggage wouldn’t be cheaper. I took my kotatsu home by plane as extra luggage for 200$. It didn’t comply with shipping sizes so I cut a box to the max size for plane luggage and filled the gaps with other things like clothes.
4. They will notice on the door and ask you to take something out until it fits.