So when it was time for me to finally leave Japan after these 3 years I knew that I would have to get all my favorite things back to Sweden, my Casio keyboard, all my manga, favorite blanket (yes, I want it with me!), and other random stuff that would mean nothing to anyone but me.
Since I could not possibly bring these things back with me on the plane ride to Sweden I searched the internet for "International Shipping companies in Japan" and found the one that seemed to be the cheapest for me to my country.
It's called "Japan Luggage Express" and they are not a shipping company, but they middle hand between you and the shipping company. So if you already know a lot about shipping and all that you probably wont need a middle hand, but I certainly did. There were loads of things, especially in Sweden that I did not understand that they helped me with.
In Japan I packed up all the things I wanted to ship in boxes and a guy came and picked them up, put labels on them. I had to write a packing list of all my stuff and what each thing was worth, and the total cost of all of it as well as filling in some other documents.
It's not that difficult, you just need to make sure you contact the company on time (I contacted this company I think 1.5 months ahead) before you leave Japan. If you leave Japan before you have made the payment to the company you might have to pay a lot of extra money paying from another country. If you cannot pay they will keep your stuff (obviously).
I think I payed "Japan Luggage Express" around 87.000 yen for their services and I thought that would be about it as far as my shipping payments would go. Of course I knew that I would probably have to pay something to customs in Sweden, but from reading other peoples stories about customs it seemed like that sum wouldn't be too much.
Needless to say I was wrong!
Turns out customs aren't very cheap in Sweden. Or maybe it wasn't the customs after all. I got a document with a bunch of different fees for different things that I had no idea would even occur. Among them were: Terminal fee, Service fee, Inland Haulage, Customs declaration (Not the same as customs fee), and other fees! These are direct translations from Swedish and I don't know how correct they are.
So when I got back to Sweden I ended up having to pay more than 5000 kronor (around 64.000 yen) just to get my stuff out of customs and w.e and shipped to my adress.
It was a lot more than expected, so feel lucky if you do not have these fees in your country!
Now my savings for university are gone, haha. I was very pissed about it, but I have gotten over it now, and hopefully my things will arrive at my door tomorrow and no more fees will occur.
Maybe tomorrow I will finally have everything from Japan with me (I have no idea where I will put everything though!).
If you are going to ship things from Japan to your country, beware of high fees! Always have some extra money saved up in case you need it, or your stuff will be forever lost in transit, something I feared would happen!
Well, atleast my things didn't get destroyed by an "act of god" while on the boat! Had that happened I would not have gotten my money back for lost stuff o.o!
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| Seriously this is from my insurance contract, how are they even allowed to have "act of god" on there, lol. They can literally call anything an "act of god" and then refuse to pay back anyones money if something were to happen xD was pretty funny to read tho |
Thank's God everything is arrived safely:)
ReplyDeleteThat's quite a sum of cash, I heard from a friend that for us Indonesian s don't have to pay tax for our moving stuffs, as long as they're not brand new things, we can registered them as our belonging from abroad to representative office just like embassy or consulate general.
Lol, I thank the weather xD.
DeleteYea I thought I would not have to pay customs for my stuff since I lived in Japan, but since I was still written as a Swedish citizen or soemthing I had to o.0 but the customs weren't that much, the other fees I mentioned made it more costly.
Thank's God everything is arrived safely:)
ReplyDeleteThat's quite a sum of cash, I heard from a friend that for us Indonesian s don't have to pay tax for our moving stuffs, as long as they're not brand new things, we can registered them as our belonging from abroad to representative office just like embassy or consulate general.
an "Act of God" is a real legal term
ReplyDelete