Now that Christmas is approaching, much faster than we’d like because the festive season is by far our favorite time of the year, there’s this self-imposed force (gosh, are we excited to watch the new Star Wars!) to be social and at least send out a few Christmas cards to show that we’re still alive and have not turned into trains ourselves (yet). Anyway, this post is about how amazing and reliable the Japanese postal services are.
Our first proper encounter probably was when we found this red and white card in our mail box because we had missed a delivery – Santa colors are the best colors! But what does it mean?! Handicapped by our miserable Japanese skills, we turned to our friend Google and found this useful guide on navigating through the Japan Post website. That was going to be the beginning of our postal service appreciation journey:
A mailing grace
… is something that we lack. But, we still love and know that we will miss the Japanese way of mailing things once we leave. Well, not the actual act of mailing things because the duck and I are amazed each time by how we’ve managed to mail something with about three words of Japanese spoken by us and three words of English by the post office staff. Gestures and notepads are surely a beautiful thing!
Anyway, back in text! Do you remember when we mentioned how stressed out we were about maybe missing the delivery of our food package (which, normally, is no problem, but in a country where you need to use a language you are not familiar with to follow up on such things, that’s a different story) which led to our decision to have our next order sent to a local Konbini? Turns out, all the stress was in vain, more or less; of course it’s always the easiest for everyone if you are there the first time your mail is being delivered. But if you’re not, there’s usually no reason to despair.
At first we were terrified when we found that missed mail slip in our mail box; how on earth would we be able to work out what it was trying to tell us? Of course there are apps and websites for translating those kinds of things but ain’t nobody got time for that! So, taking the aforementioned guide as a, well, guide we managed to have our mail delivered when and where it suited us the most. You know, the wonderful thing about those slips is that, online, you can choose a day (starting with the next day, even if it’s a Sunday) and time slot (morning, 12-14, 14-16, etc.), as well as a location (home, work, another random address) you’d like your mail redelivered to. Isn’t that wonderful?! Of course you can also pick up your mail at the local post office during regular business hours. But, before you falsely label us as lazy bums (which, to be fair, we are most of the time), I’m pretty sure that you have to make a call (in Japanese!) to arrange a pickup; so, re-delivery is the easiest option for us losers who still haven’t learned ten words of Japanese yet.
With all that convenience it’s needless to say that we are more than happy with the 
Japanese postal services, which not only include Japan Post but also delivery companies like Yamato Transport (which we mentioned in our previous post) or Sagawa Express whose (poor) delivery drivers apparently always run to get your stuff to you asap. As hopeless mail romantics who love sending and receiving letters and postcards (like in our childhood days), even seeing a mailbox on the corner of the street makes us happy, especially if we have a piece of pre-stamped mail to send! And, if it’s things like Christmas mail where each envelope needs to be weighed individually, we even dare to enter the local post office where we’ll play another game of charades with the wonderful and incredibly patient staff who, I’m pretty sure, will throw a big party when the duck and I are gone!
Writing of which, we’ll go and continue to eagerly await Christmas now – just one more week until we’ll spend most of our holidays all alone at home eating all the food or possibly freezing our butts off at the Christmas market in Yokohama…
Stick around for more chocolaty Christmas goodness later this week.
We’ll keep you posted!
The Duck in... side 