[bjornstar]

I was going to comment about this as well. We've been unable to ship packages from Japan to the US for the past 20 months. I heard that as of yesterday we are now able to ship again, but all custom forms & address labels must be printed rather than hand-written.

[Scoundreller]

Is that for legibility or are they fearful that you might smudge covid-19 onto the labels? (Which is pretty backwards given how rare contact transmission is).

[AnssiH]

My guess is that it is because electronic customs info is now mandatory (e.g. US STOP Act), and the printed labels come from a system that can transmit this info.

With handwritten labels the postal service at the shipping end would have to read them and push the data to an electronic system manually.

In Finland handwritten customs labels are still allowed, but you need to register the customs data online since Dec 2020 (or the cleark can do it at the counter).

[maxgashkov]

This is correct: https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/ead/index_en.html

[bjornstar]

My assumption is legibility, should be a nice cost savings when you don't have to read handwriting.

[EE84M3i]

I have had no problem sending packages to the US the last month. You need to use the new online tool to create the label though.