A friend in Australia is an avid builder of Japanese "garage kits", i.e.: kits manufactured by small operations which were once often situated in garages. Of course any dry place with a roof overhead and good ventilation would serve well to run a resin plastic model kit making enterprise on a small scale. But the name stuck and today a lot of small run resin plastic kits made by small manufacturers are called garage kits.
One area of logistics impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic is postal service, in particular parcel mail service. I've assumed that a higher priority was assigned to transporting protective medical equipment and that meant that non-essential parcels could afford to wait in the early stages of the pandemic. Those restrictions haven't been eased that much and so one is generally forced to send parcels overseas by surface mail.
Those restrictions have impacted businesses in terms of how and to whom they can ship retail goods to. In the case of my Aussie friend, this meant that a lot of her online purchases would have to forwarded by a third party, which was me. Her preferred shipping option was EMS parcel service which currently isn't being offered from Japan to Australia.
So since last year I've been the custodian of a number of model kits...quite a number as can be seen in this photo....
About a month and half ago she asked me if I could send the above collection to her...in a single shipment. I said "Okay" and started packing things into the biggest box I could find in my apartment. No go. So I scrounged up another bigger box from work. Still no go. I tried searching through a recycling bin for cardboard boxes at a local supermarker and was politely told not to. Finally, I remembered that one of my students ran a couple of convenience store franchises. So I asked him if he could dig up a big box. Sure enough he was successful and so last week I had a big box stuffed with a large number of model kits sitting in my room....
On Wednesday I carted that box over to my local post office. It was measured, weighed, and labels were affixed. Off to Australia!.... Or so I thought.
On my way to work I noticed that I had a few incoming calls on my phone. I pulled over at a highway rest stop and called back. It was the post office. Unfortunately they had made a mistake and it turned out that my big parcel was actually oversize. "By how much?", I asked. "40cm", was the reply. The post office clerk asked if I could return to the post office that day to collect my parcel and a refund. Nope. I was in Yamagata and heading for a point further north. I wouldn't be back in town until after 10pm. So it was arranged for me to visit the post office at 9am...early by my standards.
Having retrieved the big box, I went about splitting its contents into two boxes. I used the online Japan Post app to generate labels again and returned to the local post office to mail them off to Australia. This time everything went smoothly....
