I'm sure having a publicly available API that shows the region a code is in would be fine as long as the courier honours pricing based on that information.
If you have lots of luggage going to the airport, the "limousine bus" services (they are just coach buses) are a good option if you're near one of the pick-up locations.
Allowing two bags per person, it was cheaper for us and didn't need to send it two days in advance.
In the 90s, you used to be able to checkin, bag-drop, pass security and pass immigration at the bus terminal in Nihonbashi, and take a bus to Narita and bypass everything and go straight to your gate.
- if you're sending your luggage to the airport, check the deadline for sending, depending where you are sending from it could be 2-3 days before your flight
- hotels I paid at were cash only for this service (one of the few things I paid in cash, but likely depends on the hotel)
- some hotels did not take payments for sending, only supporting cash on delivery, so if you're sending to another hotel you should check if they will accept it
Sending from a convenience store is another option if those two last points are problems.
Another thing I thought of, the two times I needed it, the hotels sold cardboard boxes (a few hundred yen) and provided packing tape for free.
I got caught up by that first thing hard! I went to Fukuoka for 5 days and asked the person running the Yamato counter in Tokyo how many days I needed to bring my luggage in advance for it to show up at the airport. They said two days, so I showed up three days before I left Japan. Turns out they needed four[0]!
I managed to work around this by taking a round-trip Shinkansen trip[1] back to Tokyo to ship my bags from there, at the cost[2] of losing a day in Fukuoka, a Kirby Cafe reservation, and several hits to my pride. I did wind up going to a Japanese arcade for like the first time in my life and acquiring a crippling addiction to rhythm games, but that's a story for another time.
I've never sent baggage from a hotel though - I always just drag my baggage over to the nearest Yamato desk.
[0] And would only explain this to me in rather impenetrable manual keigo that resulted in them pulling out the Translator App of Shame.
[1] I had three bags plus backpack. The Shinkansen baggage limit is two bags per passenger, so I needed to get rid of at least one bag and ideally two.
[2] The monetary cost was zero - the JR Pass is like the god of train tickets and it's a shame they spiked the price.
You could've takyubin'd one or two bags to a convenience store in Tokyo and collected them once you got off the shinkansen. They basically add an arbitrary extra day to the time if you're sending to an airport, in case it gets delayed.
I checked Yamato Transport's website the day they told me it'd take four days to get my bags to the airport. Turns out they were backed up on packages coming out of Kyushu[0].
The next time I take a trip to Japan I'll probably just ship bags to the airport a week in advance and have them held there.
Most places accept IC cards, which work like debit cards that you load money onto. Hotels support credit cards, but some western banks have trouble with the Japanese payment system.
Since 2003 JCB has had an agreement to process Amex transactions in Japan, so Amex is accepted everywhere that credit cards are accepted, which is usually uncommon.
I have found practically with ts-node or bundlers ... you can get knocked off the happy path, have problems, you need to fiddle with tsconfig.json and you need to spend ages in StackOverflow posts to fix it. This sometimes happen if you want to use a certain library, or doing a mass upgrade of a 2 year old project. I have no experience with Deno.
"Studies indicate that some cultures may be more sensitive to this phenomenon than others; one study found that there is little evidence that people undergo midlife crises in Japanese and Indian cultures, raising the question of whether a mid-life crisis is mainly a cultural construct."
Japanese salarymen often undergo a crisis when they retire and suddenly find themselves with tons of time and nothing to do. Not exactly midlife, but it's of a similar vein.
I was checking out one of the suggestions in another comment for background remove and they seem to have this functionality to increase resolution: https://clipdrop.co/apis/docs/super-resolution
I think the poster making a sweeping generalization on such a large group of people is poor form.
My opinion, based on living in Japan and spending a lot of time around Japanese people, is the generalizations likely applies to a large portion of the population, but I have doubts whether it even applies to the majority.
But does it apply to them uniquely? Is there no population of, say, Europeans or Americans who prefer to order things on Amazon than interact in person? To dislike Walmart greeters? Or sit at a slot machine?
Just seems like a preference that’s trivial to find across humanity.
It is, for me, the number one most annoying aspect of life in Japan.
Every country has this - a large part of the population that has never been abroad and holds certain beliefs that would crumble upon closer inspection.
But when you get the word "Japan" in the mix, the individual suddenly disappears, and everything is explained away by cultural or genetic differences.
I really like the Cambridge Companion to Modern Japanese Culture. It takes you through many of these distortions, and how they came to be.
I'd love for sucralose to be used less, just because it really irritates my throat. Something I only found out after moving to Japan and a long process of elimination. Turns out a lot of dental products use it and in packaged food - and not just low calorie products, but also in some things like ice blocks/pops and instant cup noodles.
