Please tell me your stories, experiences, and what you’ve done when you began to make the move to Japan in regards to leaving your belongings behind or moving some of your possessions to the country.
What did you take with you? What did you leave behind? How easy was it to let go or start over? What wasn’t allowed? What was limiting? How much did it cost you? Was it worth it? Etc.
Your car, electronics, computers, clothes, furniture, expensive products, collections, memorabilia, purchases, digital purchases, etc.
Personally, I feel like I’ll lose everything with my server which has a lifetime of my memories, movies, TV shows, backups, etc. My purchases feel like they’ll get thrown down the toilet. I can let go of everything else, besides my electronics.
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Disclaimer/Caveats: My husbands’ company is paying for the move, which includes both air and sea, up to 70kg and 6m2 per adult (air/sea).
Our movers arrive on Wednesday (ahh!) and we’ve been spending the time since my husband accepted the job doing some downsizing. We are in ~660sqft in the US, anticipating ~60m2 in western Tokyo.
We are NOT bringing furniture, except two smaller disassembled items. A mid-sized kitchen island from IKEA and a small bedside table with sentimental value. No bed, no TVs, no desks, not even our nice big couch. Will buy futon bedding, kotatsu, an appropriate TV for Japanese broadcasts, and computer desks, among other items.
Nittsu (Nippon Express) took an evaluation of our unit a few weeks ago where we pointed out everything we plan to bring (everything on that shelf, but not the shelf, those two PCs over there, that fancy diploma frame, but not the other frames, etc). The agent reviewed what we can and cannot pack in. For example, with the items getting shipped by sea, no food. The movers will pack our PCs, although we have our OEM boxes for both towers, but recommended we backup our data first because insurance doesn’t cover data loss.
We’ve donated A LOT, condensed how we store certain items, and made some tough decisions. But I think we’ll be just fine with what we’ll have remaining.
The hardest part? He leaves in ~10 days. I leave in 2 months (cat isn’t cleared till late April). Making sure I don’t leave too much behind and overpack my suitcases is challenging. I like to shop >.>
Yamoto Transport.
http://www.kuronekoyamato.co.jp/ytc/en/send/services/
My company paid for the move (up to 4000 euro of shipping, not including plane ticket with extra luggage).
I packed two massive suitcases (25kg each) and my most expensive guitar to bring on the plane with me.
I got rid of my computer monitors and TVs (sold/gave away to friends), disassembled pc and threw away the case. Took ssd, cpu, and ram with me. Shipped everything else. Packed my gear, three guitars, clothes, pillow, extra stuff, etc. Brought my ps4 with me on the plane (didn’t want to wait for shipping to play some videogames).
Everything ended up arriving in about 3 months by sea. Ended up paying about 2000 euro total.
Company payed for move, should have brought more good quality furniture etc but this time skipped it due to decent furnished arrangements made. Ended up with bringing our large tv (wasn’t going to pay for overpriced tv here) and as we don’t watch “tv”, only streaming.. I also don’t have to be dishonest to NHK :p
Was all done via airfreight
I’d be curious how much it would be like the flat rate.
Lets just say a bed all you belong ie- valuables and pictures lamp, or desk. Let’s say if you could pack up your living room or bed room, how much would it cost.
First, please search the sub. This has been discussed frequently.
Second, this depends entirely on the nature of your move. Expat package with a large shipping allowance through a major international moving company? English teacher coming over with two suitcases? Moving to a small apartment? Moving to the inaka?
Every situation is different, and the advice given depends largely on how YOU will be moving over.
Company moved everything for me, so it was free.
What I left behind: Sold large furniture because I wasn’t sure it would fit.
What was limiting? Size of future apartment vs current house.
What wasn’t allowed: Vehicles. Brand new (in the box) items as to avoid paying tax (so i was told)
Lessons learned. I still brought too much shit.
My parents had already moved to another country, so I had no family home to leave stuff like photo albums, old kids toys/baby clothes, my old CDs/DVDs, old heirloom dinner set etc. So I brought all that kind of stuff. Only electronics I brought was a passive 3D PC monitor (they don’t seem to make that kind of stuff anymore)
Found a friend of a friend who works at freight company, sent 6 moving boxes/420 KG on a pallet via air freight for $600. Had to go to the freight terminal of the airport and deal with customs myself.
I took everything I needed and couldn’t or didn’t wanna rebuy and went to Japan with 2 suitcases and a backpack. I had no company spoonfeeding me with a moving company but it was fine.
Cost: A plane ticket
Came over as the bright eyed foreigner with 2 suitcases to teach English but now I have a job where I can actually afford big Tokyo apartments (not inaka Tokyo), so if I ever wanna move back it’s gonna suck… no plans to though.
I hear that garbage and recycling is time consuming and that there are both size and category limitations. You wouldn’t want to have a lot of unwanted stuff that’s hard to dispose of… If anyone can add to this matter would be nice
It depends on your situation. Basically shipping to Japan is expensive. There’s not a ton of cheap options. If you’re coming from the US and you’re looking to send in bulk it starts at $1000+ for around 10ish medium to large size boxes. If you need to send more then it’s more than that. If you only want to send a few boxes you are probably looking at $150+ per box through USPS (depends on weight at that size). If a company is paying then you have a choice of what to bring. Do you bring as much as you can or do you have a fresh start? If you’re going to teach English then you probably want to limit to what you bring to 2 suitcases. If you have parents or friends that can hold onto things then leave what you can with them to get at a different time.
In our case my husband and I have moved to Japan and are not sure if we will make it permanent. Currently we hope it will be, but we have realistic expectations that in a year or two the things we dislike will wear us down. Since there is a chance of us going back we got a storage unit for the items we couldn’t easily replace or had sentimental value. We just think of it as additional rent, lol. Paying for a place big enough in Japan would be much more expensive than keeping the storage unit in the US.
Regardless of what you do the first step is to determine if the items are worth the value of shipping or storing them. If you are paying $100 a month for storage (we pay less that that) that’s $1200 in a year. If you’re storing $1000 worth of stuff then it might be better getting rid of things and re-buying things. The same goes for shipping. If it costs you $1000 to ship and the items were $1500 new and now they are 10 years old and only worth a quarter of that then you might be better off selling and re-buying.
The next step is to determine what you need in Japan. You might have a smaller space, which means you might not have room for everything. We got rid of a 1 year old Instant Pot, but we couldn’t imagine finding space for it in our potential kitchen (we were right, no room for it currently). We got rid of all of our kitchen stuff (except a few special cups and utensils).
Then you want to think about what you can re-buy in Japan. I am plus size and got rid of a lot of clothes because I didn’t think I would need them all in Japan, that was a mistake. On the other side I got rid of a lot of shoes and I see a ton of great shoes I could buy if I need to. Computers are also more expensive in Japan, so we traded our desktops for new laptops to bring to Japan instead.