[kmeisthax]

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.

[lmm]

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.

[kmeisthax]

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