Twice this week I have had cause to be impressed with Japan Post. Japan Post is a bit like a post office in the olden days... a post office where the primary businese is the post (there are separate counteres for postal banking and insurance). People aren't queuing for 30 mins to get served. You don't go there to pay bills. You can't even buy pens and notebooks let alone calendars, clock radios, i-tunes cards, stuffed toys and plethora of other things that you find in a post office in Autralia (and probably any other country where it has been fully corporatised).
On Monday I received a parcel from Mum and Dad. The outside was paper wrapping. It was a wet wet day and it arrived in the mailbox inside a plastic bag, courtesy of Japan Post. (They didn't realise Mum and Dad are pretty switched on and had put the parcel in a plastic bag before wrapping it in paper).
And then today I was sending a very belated birthday parcel from the main post office in Shinjuku. There was a German woman there who spoke no Japanese and middling English. (I don't think I have met a German before who did not have fluent English...) She arrived at the PO to tell them that a parcel she had sent last week to Germany, by EMS, (express mail with a track and trace function) had not arrived. But she didn't have the parcel number and she wasn't exactly sure if she had sent it Mon or Tues, but she did know it was the morning...... The post office in Shinjuku would send hundreds of EMS parcels a day.... I explained the situation to the PO staff and remarkably they got her to write the details of the parcel, with the intention of looking through all the parcel slips. I didn't stay long enough to find out whether they found it but I was quite surprised that they would even try. She didn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, and didn't really seem to get it that they were being exceptionally obliging...I hope they could find it quickly.....
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