[methou]

I had a similar experience but in Japan.

My CPAP machine was held by customs, they asked me to provide some extra paperwork from another department, which boiles down to a form and a "prescription". Fortunately they accept american prescriptions. I emailed all of the docs to the department, and they told me since I'm physically in Japan, I have to do what Japanese would do - send a physical mail in an envolope. A week later I got the approval mailed back to me, scanned them and emailed them back to the customs, they released my package.

Then, the shipper messed up with my address, they use a local partner for delivery, but failed to pass them my phone number and the second line in my address. Apparently the poor delivery guy attempted to deliver for a week, I found it out in the tracking page, called the customer service, they figured out and eventually have it delivered.

I thought it was terrible, but now.

[positr0n]

Back in the day I remember reading patio11 posts on navigating the Japanese bureaucracy and he described this as "doing SQL JOINs" across different departments by filling out forms and visiting each one.

[codewench]

Japanese customs is a special thing. I had a plastic Christmas tree held in quarantine for 9 months because the box said "tree", and all attempts to point out that the tree was in fact fake, and probably not of serious biological concern feel on deaf ears.