beware the yakkan shoumei...

I don't know about you, but I live in what I consider to be a fairly large, boisterous city. So for a process, such as mailing a packet of information to Japan, I figure would be relatively easy and I shouldn't have to worry too much about it.

My experience with the Yakkan Shoumei has been a tough one. I have read multiple blog entries about how effortlessly they were able to send it and receive it, and how you should not worry as much about it as anything else.

Which I will say that the application itself isn't very hard to understand or fill out, the only thing you need to worry about is the US Postal Service.

Never in my life have I had such a horrible experience trying to mail something. I had all of my paperwork together, btw for future reference, this is what you'll need:

2 signed copies of my Declaration of Medication form

1 Explanation of Medication page for each medication

1 Import of Medication form
(All of these forms should be available in a .pdf file --along with filled-in sample pages-- HERE.)

Copy of my Prescription from my Doctor

1 standard envelope with my address on it (so they can mail you the Yakkan Shoumei)

The only thing left on my list of needed materials to mail were the International Reply Coupons. These are little coupons of a sort (completely in French, lovely) that you mail them so they can go to their post office in Japan and turn them in for Japanese postage stamps. You should be able to get these at any of your US Postal Office locations.

I went to 7 all across the city, including the largest post office we had, and no one had them, and if they did have them they were expired. Btw, they do not know what these are at many locations, and do not try to go to FedEx or UPS, they do not sell them there.

I was at my wit's end. I had the perfect amount of time allotted to mail my package on to Japan had I in fact had those reply coupons. Part of me wishes I had just mailed it without the coupons and maybe they would have taken pity on me (which might have happened, I mean the coupons aren't that expensive, but they stressed they wanted them).

I figured out you can buy them on the USPS website (I've linked you directly where you can buy them) and have them delivered to your house. Now, like all other important mail, this took nearly a week to get to me. Time was running out, but I finally had EVERYTHING I needed to mail. So I was going to overnight it.

Nope. No one (not UPS, FedEx, USPS, etc) overnights things to Japan anymore, at least not where I live. Maybe if I had driven 2 hours to Atlanta and tried from there, a plane might be on its way to Japan, but no. They said it would take about a week to send it to them, that was as fast as it could go. Considering it takes the office a week to send it back. That would be two weeks before I got my Yakkan Shoumei and that was if I was lucky. Even then, I'd have been in Japan by then.

So I ended up at FedEx at 3 o'clock in the morning, taking another blog's advise and just faxing it to them. But like many other normal individuals, I don't own a fax machine. So it cost me $35 to fax 10 pages (first and foremost a note including why I was faxing this information to them, alongside my name and address and hopefully they would have taken pity on me--but I doubt it), and on this guy's blog, he received a response. I never did. Probably because FedEx doesn't fax things with their return fax number, so they probably never got the number in the first place. My mistake for not writing it clear as day the first thing I faxed.

So all-in-all, I had a horrible time with this process, not because getting the information together is difficult, but getting the information to Japan is difficult as hell.

My suggestions for you, if you have run across this blog entry and are suddenly scared about this:

If your post office doesn't have any International Reply Coupons and you don't have a week to wait for them to get to your house, GO AHEAD AND SHIP IT!

If you're thinking of faxing it and it's not YOUR fax machine, DON'T DO IT!

Plan for this as far in advance as you can. That way you will have enough time to pull everything together, ship it off, and get it returned to you in a normal reasonable fashion.

Open up the phonebook. There's no reason to waste gas driving to multiple places like I did in some manic maybe-if-they-have-them-I-can-go-ahead-and-ship-this attitude.

Don't feel bad about it. You're not the only one.

Luckily I do not have any life-threatening conditions or medications that I cannot live without. I just didn't want to be detained for having any medication in my bag. So regardless I plan to bring along all of my information, including my receipt for faxing it to them and if they ask, I'll try to explain it as best I can and hope that having all of that information already filled out will help. If not, I guess they can throw it away.