Getting A Move On

Moving to Japan took a considerable and sometimes frustrating effort, but moving back out, with more items to deal with and under Japanese regulations, was different and a bit more complicated still.  We had to be in Japan until the end of our contracts at the end of March, but we still got vacation time right before that, so the plan was to close out the apartment early, pay partial rent for the last month, and use some of the savings to fund time traveling around Japan.  While cost effective, this meant we had to wrap up work and the apartment with precision, reaching an empty apartment and an empty work to-do list at the same pre-determined time.  A generous-but-not-comprehensive moving allowance from the school was our leverage, the amount and complexity of things to be shipped or otherwise dealt with, the obstacle.

We're not the kind of people who buy things all the time, and of course we didn't expect to be bringing most of the furniture, but we did over time accumulate a solid supply of extra kitchen goods, office supplies, books, and other errata like hangers. If you're missing any clothes hangers, I think they wound up in our storage area, the apparent outlet for some Bermuda Triangle of Hanger Loss.  Let us also not forget yarn - total quantity exceeding 35 miles by her spreadsheet, up slightly from three years ago. One major source of stuff for expatriates in Japan is other expatriates leaving the country and leaving some of their stuff behind.  By our best guess, something like 30% of everything in the apartment came to us this way.  Things to bring ranged from computers and monitors to dress clothing to ikebana vases to the aforementioned books (~400lbs worth) and things to give away or sell  (not going to bring our Japanese fridge or washing machine home, but weren't going to give such expensive items away either) were similarly varied.

The shipping allowance was part of our contract, and the amount was at least five times more than what we spent to ship stuff out here.  Based on that, you might think that we'd have no trouble getting everything back to the US.  It should be remembered though, that in Japan everything has a method, or rule, or book that must be slavishly followed, and we can't read that book.  Working through a translator, the rules of the game kept...creeping sideways, changing, mutating, while all the while denials were issued that anything had changed. We'd be completely lost without someone assisting us with all of this, but sometimes the translator would say two very clearly different things on different days and, well, which one should we base our planning on? We've were told we absolutely could not pack anything ourselves due to Japanese law, that we must pack all the things ourselves because the shipping company wouldn't do that, can't use specific boxes, must use specific boxes, a mix of box types was OK, items had to be packed only with items of the same type, no disregard that, you could mix at will, if we spent more than the allowance we'd have to pay extra, that paying extra was impossible, or that the amount of the allowance was sort of flexible and if we only went over by a little bit the school would make up the difference.  We were told that the moving company the school liked was the only option the school allowed, that you could use any company or method you liked, that the moving company the school liked was a ripoff (by departing teachers) before getting numbers showing they were pretty competitive from the translator. Complicating this, we wanted to ship ahead to Indiana rather than trucking the stuff across the country from New Hampshire, so we needed to convince this Japanese shipping company to make delivery to a storage area where we would not be there to sign for anything.  It was not, overall, a simple process just to set up the move, and executing it took weeks, going right up against the deadline.  Keep in mind that the day after the moving company took most of our stuff, the apartment had to be totally empty and cleaned out so we could get it inspected and hand over the keys.

Packing in progress - boxes on the left are mostly ready to go, stuff on the right needs to go into boxes.

Even if we could pay above the budget (never found out for sure if we even could) shipping internationally can be very expensive, so we wanted to bring the exact correct amount of stuff to use up the budget without going over.  The price gets especially high when you've got professionals packing your belongings with great care and ample padding rather than skeins of yarn and clothing to fill the crevices and fill out the boxes. We opted to do most of the packing ourselves to maximize, or rather, minimize, the volume of goods, since sea freight is charged by volume rather than weight.  We had the moving company pack all the fragile and valuable items and hopefully the attrition rate will be lower than it was coming here, when we lost more than 40% of everything that could possibly break, and some things I didn't think could realistically break at all.

So we started packing and filling boxes (free boxes and tape from the moving company, delivered anytime you wanted, which was nice) and as is the way of moves, kept finding more stuff to either pack or give away.  We had people over to the apartment at least half a dozen times to pick up free items or to get great deals on the non-free items.  We ended up setting up the office as something of a free store, and putting all the items that people had dibs on in the storage room - just keeping straight who was getting what for how much was non-trivial - we'd get email and phone calls to me or to Ana and we had to keep updating each other and the list to not promise the same thing to different people, etc.

When the actual moving day came, we'd been up well past midnight the night before, and got up early to finish the last of the preparations.  When the moving company came at 9AM, all we had left to do was fill out the customs forms as they packed up the remaining items.  It took several hours, but went off without a hitch.  Making that deadline and seeing it all come together was a tremendous relief.

Yamato freight services, reporting for duty.

 Our shipment was officially about 300 cubic feet, all told, which looks a lot smaller in the truck than in the apartment.

 Moving day was a long one, and the next day we had to clean, and we cleaned hard because our security deposit was enormous.  We ended up getting almost all of it back.

She's not normally this excited about cleaning the shoe closet.

Making the cleaning-out deadline was also a relief, though one tempered by the realization that we now had to personally carry most of these items across town, across Japan, and eventually, home.  This picture shows what we walked out of the apartment carrying.

We managed to take home everything that we really wanted to, threw out some more (old office clothes needed to die), and did our part to make sure that the remaining expatriates had waaaayy too much stuff - for one couple that we stayed with for a few days after moving out of our apartment, I think there was more of our stuff than their stuff in their apartment.  At one point, I was using my old computer at my old desk sitting on one of our old cushions on top of my old chair in their apartment, and I have to say I pretty much forgot I was not at home.

Last picture out the main apartment window - typical Kanazawa weather

It will be another month or so before the bulk of our move makes it to the storage area, and a few months after that that we'll actually be moving it into a living space.  We'll have more on that living space and where it is and why later. Next up, we travel around Japan for 10 days before saying our final farewells and heading to the US!