Send the bag on the morning you leave, and it will be waiting at your next hotel the following day — a medium suitcase from Tokyo to Kyoto costs about ¥2,310 with Yamato, and it is out of your hands for one night. That last part is the whole decision. Luggage forwarding is not really a shipping question; it is a scheduling one.
Almost every guide to this topic explains what takkyubin is and stops there. The part that actually goes wrong is picking the wrong day to send it — or packing your passport inside the bag that leaves without you. This page is organised around your route rather than around the courier.
All prices below are read off Yamato Transport's own published rate table (checked 12 August 2026) rather than from other travel blogs, which is why some of them differ from figures you may have seen elsewhere. They are approximate and vary by size band, region pair and drop-off point.
What it actually costs
Yamato Transport — the black-cat "Kuroneko" company, whose service is branded TA-Q-BIN (takkyubin) — prices by a size band, not by weight alone. The band is the sum of your bag's length + width + height in centimetres. If the weight pushes you into a higher band than the dimensions do, Yamato charges the higher of the two.
This is where most published figures go wrong. The widely-repeated "¥1,650 Tokyo to Kyoto" is the size 100 fare, and a size 100 parcel totals 100 cm across all three sides — that is a duffel bag, not a suitcase. Here is where real luggage lands:
Size band | Max weight | Typical bag | Tokyo → Kyoto |
|---|---|---|---|
100 | 10 kg | Small holdall or backpack | ¥1,650 |
120 | 15 kg | Cabin spinner (≈55×40×25 cm) | ¥1,970 |
140 | 20 kg | Medium check-in (≈67×45×27 cm) | ¥2,310 |
160 | 25 kg | Large check-in (≈77×52×31 cm) | ¥2,630 |
Approximate; fares are the published Kanto→Kansai rates and vary by region pair, size band and date.
Two details that materially change the number:
You get ¥100 off per parcel for handing the bag over in person at a Yamato sales office, an agency or a convenience store, rather than booking a pickup.
The hard ceiling is 200 cm total and 30 kg. Above either, TA-Q-BIN will not take it. That is generous — a 30 kg bag is over most airlines' checked allowance anyway — but oversized sports gear can breach the 200 cm rule.
Tip: Measure the bag before you assume the cheap fare. A suitcase that looks "medium" is usually 135–145 cm across three sides, which puts it in size 140. Budget ¥2,000–¥2,700 per bag per intercity leg and you will not be surprised.
The send day is the whole decision
Standard TA-Q-BIN between major cities on Honshu is a next-day service. Your bag travels overnight. So the rule is simple and it has one trap in it:
Send the bag on the morning you leave city A, and pack for one night without it.
Here is the worked version. Say you are in Tokyo until Thursday and in Kyoto from Thursday night:
Thursday, ~09:00 — hand the suitcase to your Tokyo hotel's front desk (or a convenience store) before that location's cutoff. Address it to your Kyoto hotel, in your name, with your check-in date written on the waybill.
Thursday, all day — you sightsee, ride the Shinkansen and check into the Kyoto hotel carrying only a daypack.
Thursday night — you sleep with whatever you kept back. The suitcase is in transit.
Friday — the bag arrives at the Kyoto hotel, typically during the afternoon or evening delivery window.
That is one night without your main bag, not zero. People who expect same-day arrival are thinking of a different, far more expensive product (see below).
Yamato lets the sender specify a delivery window from five slots — 8:00–12:00, 14:00–16:00, 16:00–18:00, 18:00–20:00 and 19:00–21:00 — at no extra charge. Picking one is worth doing: it tells the hotel roughly when to expect the bag, and it stops a delivery attempt landing before the front desk is ready for it.
Cutoff times are set by the drop-off point, not nationally. Yamato's own wording is that the sending deadline "varies depending on the drop off counter." A hotel's last pickup of the day and a convenience store's last collection are different times, and both are earlier than you would guess — often late morning to early afternoon for next-day service. Ask your hotel the night before; that one question is the difference between a Friday arrival and a Saturday one.
This is also why the shipment hangs off your itinerary rather than the other way round. You cannot choose a send morning until you know which night you are in which city — which is exactly what a dated day-by-day Japan route settles.
What goes in the overnight bag
This is the failure mode people actually post about online. The suitcase arrives perfectly; the problem is what was inside it.
Keep with you, always:
Passport and any residence or entry documents. Non-negotiable. Hotels require the passport at check-in, and yours will be in another prefecture.
Wallet, cards and cash. You are paying for the shipment on the spot, and cash is still king at small counters.
All medication, in its original packaging.
Phone, charger, power bank, and any travel adapter you only have one of.
One change of clothes, nightwear, and the next morning's outfit. You will get dressed once before the bag catches up.
Toiletries and contact lens supplies for one night.
Anything fragile or genuinely valuable — cameras, laptops, jewellery.
That last point is worth a number. Yamato states each parcel is insured up to ¥300,000 (tax included). Loss is rare to the point of being a non-issue in practice, but ¥300,000 is the stated ceiling, and it is not an airline-style baggage policy. Do not put a ¥400,000 camera body in a forwarded suitcase and assume it is covered.
Tip: A packable 20–30 litre daypack is the single best piece of kit for this style of travel. It collapses into the suitcase on days you do not need it, and becomes your overnight bag on days you do.
Where to hand the bag over — and the Lawson trap
You have three realistic options.
Your hotel front desk. The easiest by far, and it is standard practice at almost any business hotel or above. Staff will hand you the waybill, often help fill it in, and many will complete the Japanese address section for you. Waybills can be written in English. Payment is at the time of sending — this is not a prepaid service.
A convenience store. Here is the detail nearly every guide gets wrong: "drop it at any konbini" is false. Yamato's own FAQ names the chains that accept TA-Q-BIN as 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, NewDays, Daily Yamazaki and Poplar.
Lawson is not on that list. Lawson handles Japan Post's Yu-Pack, which is a different company with a different network, different rates and a different waybill. Walking into a Lawson with a Yamato-addressed suitcase will not work. If you are unsure, look for the black-cat Kuroneko sticker on the door rather than trusting the brand name.
Two limits apply at convenience stores specifically: the store will only take what fits and what it is set up for — Yamato notes some stores cannot accept parcels above size 180 — and neither Cool TA-Q-BIN nor International TA-Q-BIN is available there. For a standard suitcase in the 120–160 range, a 7-Eleven or FamilyMart is fine.
A Yamato sales office. The fallback for anything oversized, unusual, or when you want the full service menu. Yamato's site has a branch locator.
The alternatives to Yamato are real but thinner on the ground for travellers: Sagawa Express and Japan Post's Yu-Pack both move luggage between cities. Yamato is the default recommendation because its hotel and convenience-store network is the densest and its English-language support the best developed — not because the others are bad.
Airport to hotel, and hotel to airport
This is a separate use case with its own timing, and getting it wrong is more expensive than getting the city-to-city version wrong.
Landing → hotel. Yamato runs Airport TA-Q-BIN counters at the major airports. You clear customs, walk to the counter, send the bag to your hotel and take the train into the city unencumbered. Be aware of a fee most guides omit: a counter usage fee of ¥660 (tax included) applies at Narita, Haneda and Kansai, on top of the shipping fare.
Hotel → airport, before you fly. This is the one people get wrong. The instinct is to send it the day before. Yamato's own guidance is stricter: drop it off by two days prior to your departure date — three days in some areas. Sending a bag to an airport is not the same overnight lane as sending it to a hotel, and the buffer exists because a bag that misses your flight is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.
If your departure is tight, the safer play is to keep the bag with you and use a coin locker or a station storage counter on the final day.
Tip: Sending luggage to an airport means you will not see it again until the check-in desk. Pack your flight-day essentials — documents, medication, valuables — in your carry-on before it goes, two days out.
When forwarding is the wrong call
Forwarding earns its fee when you are changing city and staying at least two nights at the destination. It is the wrong tool in three common situations:
You are in the same city for two nights or more. Just leave the bag in the hotel room. Forwarding solves a transit problem you do not have.
You have a same-day onward leg — for example a day trip out to Hiroshima and back to your Osaka hotel. You need a few hours of storage, not an overnight shipment.
You are moving cities and arriving the same evening you need the bag. Next-day means next-day.
For those, use a coin locker. Every major station has banks of them, and as of 2026 they run roughly ¥400 for a small, ¥500–600 for a medium and ¥700–800 for a large in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. They charge by calendar day, not by the hour — a bag left past midnight incurs another day. Large lockers at big stations fill up by mid-morning during peak season, so have a backup in mind.
Staffed storage counters are the backup. Yamato's own Kyoto baggage centres, for instance, hold a bag for ¥1,000 per bag per day — more than a locker, but they take oversized items and they are still open when you get back at 20:00.
Fitting it to your route
The pattern that works on a standard multi-city trip is simple: forward the big bag on each city-change morning, carry a daypack, and never forward on a day you need the contents that evening. On a two-week route with three base cities, that is two shipments and roughly ¥4,500–¥5,500 in total — the price of one taxi ride, to not drag a suitcase through Tokyo Station at rush hour.
The prerequisite is knowing your nights. Which city are you in on the night of the 14th? That determines the send morning, the delivery address and what goes in the daypack — and it is the same information you need for booking Shinkansen seats and for a longer multi-city route. Sort the route first and the logistics fall out of it.
While you are setting up, the apps worth downloading before you fly cover the IC card, transit routing and the pre-arrival paperwork — the other things that are much easier to do at home than at the airport.
FAQ
How long does luggage forwarding take in Japan? Between major cities on Honshu — Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya — plan on next-day delivery when you send in the morning. Remote areas and the islands take longer. Yamato's English-language pages do not publish a region-pair timetable and its delivery-date estimator is Japanese-only, so confirm the arrival date at the counter when you hand the bag over rather than assuming.
Can I send luggage the same day I need it? Not with standard TA-Q-BIN. Yamato does sell same-day delivery, but it is a different, premium product on limited routes — as an example from Yamato's own page, a size 160 bag from Kyoto Station into Kyoto city is ¥3,470 per piece, and from Haneda Airport into Tokyo's 23 wards ¥5,780 per piece, versus ¥2,630 for the standard overnight Tokyo–Kyoto leg. Coverage is restricted to selected wards and counters, and cutoffs are early.
What if I'm staying in an Airbnb or a guesthouse with no front desk? This is the one situation where forwarding gets awkward — there may be nobody to receive the bag. Either arrange the delivery window for a time you will be there yourself, or send it to a Yamato sales office near the accommodation and collect it. Do not send an unattended delivery to an unstaffed rental.
Do I need to speak Japanese? No. Waybills can be completed in English, and hotel staff routinely fill in the Japanese address portion. Have your next hotel's full address and phone number saved on your phone — that is the only thing you genuinely need to supply.
Is my luggage insured? Each parcel is covered up to ¥300,000 (tax included). Keep valuables, electronics and documents with you regardless.
Can I forward luggage to my hotel before I arrive in Japan? No — the shipment starts inside Japan. The closest equivalent is sending it from the airport counter on the day you land.
What is the difference between takkyubin and takuhaibin? Takuhaibin is the generic Japanese term for home-delivery parcel service. Takkyubin (TA-Q-BIN) is Yamato's trademarked brand of it. In practice travellers use them interchangeably, and any of the named convenience stores will understand either.
Plan the route, then the shipment
Every decision on this page — which morning to send, which hotel address goes on the waybill, what stays in the daypack, whether a locker beats a courier — comes back to one thing: knowing which night you are in which city.
Get that on paper first. You can build your custom Japan travel itinerary in a few minutes, export it as a PDF, and read your send days straight off it. Then the luggage looks after itself.
