Thursday, July 15, 2010

moving from japan 2 – shipping

i previously made a post here about shipping items using the post office, and i stand corrected:

the post office DOES do pick-ups.

i discovered this entirely by chance when purchasing boxes from the branch near my house; once again this has proven that JPO has some incompetent people in their employ, at the officers at the City Hall branch informed me that there’s no such service and that i’ll have to rely on one of the private takuhaibin companies for this.

anyway, pick-up service is called shuuka in Japanese (集荷), and the website is here. It’s in Japanese and I dont think there's English service available.

You can arrange for a pick-up online, or call 0800-0800-111. The service is available from 8am - 9pm daily. I believe the pick-up schedule is the same as for the redelivery service with 4 different time periods to choose from; basically you can call before noon to have them come pick up your boxes that very afternoon/evening.

Do also inform them while scheduling the pick-up that you will require customs labels (raberu; 1 for each box) or get them in person at a post office near you. I don't think there's an extra charge for this pick-up service, which is awesome.

I’m really happy my Fukushima-ku post office had this great, helpful person present. Although he gave me the wrong number to call, at least he equipped me with labels etc to go with my box – which led to questions from me that resulted in today’s important discovery - which the people at the City Hall branch didnt. I’m not sure why they didnt, since you have to affix labels on to box for both domestic and international deliveries anyway.

0 comments: