I’ve got a package that needs to be sent to the UK fairly quickly (not a Christmas present!) but the UK postal force is on strike. :< The recipient is refusing to let me send it by Japan Post because they’re worried it won’t make it on time or will get lost.
The trouble is that I’m in rural Hokkaido. We don’t have any DHL or FedEx offices nearby. UPS says they pick up from most addresses in Japan but considering they couldn’t pick up from a suburban address I lived at in Nagoya I’m willing to bet they can’t pick up from rural Hokkaido either.
Yamato and Sagawa are both asking me to register for some weird European Commission code (even though they’re not commercial goods that I’m sending— it’s literally fabric scraps used for dressmaking) so they’re out too.
Does anyone in a rural area have an independent courier they’ve shipped stuff overseas with successfully? Thank you <3
1 comment
This is very easy, with fedex. (Other services are similar).
You prepare a label online, and do NOT arrange pickup. Then you call fedex japan at 0120-003-200 and tell them you have a package you want to ship through them, and give them the tracking. Then you tell them you’re sending it to their osaka service center. They will agree, and tell you to go ahead and do that. put all the fedex shipping stuff (invoice, etc) into a clear pouch, with the awb label facing out. Flip the box over.
Now you make another label, this time for kuroneko/sagawa/whatever. On it, you write the osaka center address: https://local.fedex.com/en-jp/osaka/osaka-shi-suminoe-ku
in the contents, write down approximately what’s in it (gifts/etc) and in the empty space somewhere write the fedex AWB number.
Then have kuroneko/sagwa/whatever locally pick it up. When it arrives to Osaka, it will be marked as ‘picked up’ on fedex tracking site, and off it goes. Hokkaido to Osaka should take a day or two max by domestic courier. If you can arrange pickup early in the morning for kuroneko (before 9-10am) and ship it as “time service” it can definitely arrive to osaka before noon next day.
edit: why osaka? that’s their shipping hub, all the stuff will go through there anyway, so if you sent it to any other location they’d have to re-send it to osaka making it more slow.