A Fukuokan's Notes from Sapporo

Our move from Fukuoka to Sapporo cost a fortune. I never imagined how much it would cost to move some furniture, chipped tableware, old comics and old clothes.

As you can see in my previous post, we hired a major Japanese transport company, because their quote was the lowest among the three companies we asked for estimates: Art, Sakai, and one of the biggest players in the industry.

The result: you get what you paid for. There were so many troubles that I ended up cursing Japan’s most prestigious (-looking) transport company, the one that transports cultural properties from museums to museums. The following is my experience with them.

First of all, the packing boxes they provided were irritatingly small. I mean, it was irritating because the boxes were very slightly smaller than the size I needed for bigger plates and albums. Also, the cushioning materials quickly ran out. I had to run to a local DIY store to get some more. Meanwhile, there were too many packing tapes.

On the day of the actual move, the team of young workers quickly packed bigger items such as the TV set, air conditioners, and so on. So quickly that their work sometimes got rough. As a result, our shredder’s leg was broken (but it was quickly compensated, no questions asked).

In Sapporo, things got worse. The older moving workers came earlier, in the snow. They were all temporary staff (or so they said). They were apparently unprofessional. My layout plan, which I spent quite a long time making, was completely ignored, and they asked everything verbally.

The worst thing was that the documents to prove the number of boxes moved were lost. The leader of the Sapporo team finally started counting the boxes after they brought them all in at random, and the number he counted was one more than what the Fukuoka team had told us. He casually said, “Oh, I seem to have miscounted,” and started blaming the Fukuoka team for not passing the document to his team. That’s it. After the gentlemen left, we were left with cardboard boxes all over the place, and I had to rearrange them myself.

(Helped by Chat GPT)