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Comment by coel | Hacker News Reader

A few notes to be aware of:

- if you're sending your luggage to the airport, check the deadline for sending, depending where you are sending from it could be 2-3 days before your flight

- hotels I paid at were cash only for this service (one of the few things I paid in cash, but likely depends on the hotel)

- some hotels did not take payments for sending, only supporting cash on delivery, so if you're sending to another hotel you should check if they will accept it

Sending from a convenience store is another option if those two last points are problems.

Another thing I thought of, the two times I needed it, the hotels sold cardboard boxes (a few hundred yen) and provided packing tape for free.

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I got caught up by that first thing hard! I went to Fukuoka for 5 days and asked the person running the Yamato counter in Tokyo how many days I needed to bring my luggage in advance for it to show up at the airport. They said two days, so I showed up three days before I left Japan. Turns out they needed four[0]!

I managed to work around this by taking a round-trip Shinkansen trip[1] back to Tokyo to ship my bags from there, at the cost[2] of losing a day in Fukuoka, a Kirby Cafe reservation, and several hits to my pride. I did wind up going to a Japanese arcade for like the first time in my life and acquiring a crippling addiction to rhythm games, but that's a story for another time.

I've never sent baggage from a hotel though - I always just drag my baggage over to the nearest Yamato desk.

[0] And would only explain this to me in rather impenetrable manual keigo that resulted in them pulling out the Translator App of Shame.

[1] I had three bags plus backpack. The Shinkansen baggage limit is two bags per passenger, so I needed to get rid of at least one bag and ideally two.

[2] The monetary cost was zero - the JR Pass is like the god of train tickets and it's a shame they spiked the price.

You could've takyubin'd one or two bags to a convenience store in Tokyo and collected them once you got off the shinkansen. They basically add an arbitrary extra day to the time if you're sending to an airport, in case it gets delayed.

I checked Yamato Transport's website the day they told me it'd take four days to get my bags to the airport. Turns out they were backed up on packages coming out of Kyushu[0].

The next time I take a trip to Japan I'll probably just ship bags to the airport a week in advance and have them held there.

[0] Hoenn

Isn't most of Japan cash only?

Not anymore

Most places accept IC cards, which work like debit cards that you load money onto. Hotels support credit cards, but some western banks have trouble with the Japanese payment system.

Since 2003 JCB has had an agreement to process Amex transactions in Japan, so Amex is accepted everywhere that credit cards are accepted, which is usually uncommon.

Coincidentally, that’s also the most "Amex in Europe" experience ever

it's changed pretty drastically in the past 10 years. aside from a few odd tiny bars, i think cards were accepted everywhere i went in tokyo and kyoto

It's PayPay country now.

https://paypay.ne.jp

You can go to some of the most remote places and they'll accept paypay lol

As mentioned by others, things have changed - I used credit card 90% of the time on my last trip earlier this year.

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