Baggage forwarding?

Hi there, it's me again, again. I have a question about travelling through Japan. I will be doing a tour beginning in Tokyo, but I will hopefully be going to Okinawa for a few days after doing the mainland, and then home. I've heard about baggage forwarding available on some tours. My question is whether I can pay to have my bags forwarded to my final hotel at any time, and if so, how does one go about arranging this? I'm sure I'm going to be getting a tonne of stuff and I would love to drag as little of it with me as possible! Is this type of thing cost prohibitive?

Please and thank yous,
-Meghan

Delivery services in Japan are inexpensive:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2278.html

This is great!! Thanks so much for the super fast reply!

Just back from Japan a couple of weeks ago. We used baggage forwarding, it cost about £10 per bag (depends on size) which we did through our hotel. Being super efficient, the Japanese had our bags waiting at our destination without any trouble.

I did the forwarding from
NRT airport - Nikko : 260 yen
Nikko - Maihama : abt 150 yen

Very easy. Just need to fill up the form and most important get the address and telephone no. of the destination you want to send the luggage to.

Absolutely, forwarding is cheaper and more efficient in Japan than anywhere else in the world.

Last year at Christmas time we finally thought to use luggage forwarding in Japan, and it was fantastic.

We arrived at Narita Airport, and forwarded one of our bags to Kyoto and the other to Osaka. It cost $13 (Australian) per bag, and our bags aren't small. Checking the bags was quick and efficient, and the staff were very good. It's handy to have the name of your hotel written in Japanese with an address if you can manage it, but they still had to translate one of ours and find it and that was no problem either. They always have at least one bilingual staff member at the counters at the airport, so no problem there.

We stayed overnight in Tokyo and took the shinkansen to Kyoto the next day. When we arrived at our hotel, the bag we had forwarded was waiting for us in perfect shape.

When we departed Kyoto, we forwarded that bag back to our hotel in Tokyo that we would be going back to after Osaka, and continued on to Osaka for the next few days.

Obviously, our bag that we had forwarded from Narita to Osaka was waiting there for us when we arrived.

Again, just to save us from having to travel with our large bags on the train, we forwarded our bag from Osaka the night before we were going back to Tokyo, and even that bag got to our hotel by the time we got there!

In both cases, our hotels also had luggage forwarding available in the lobby and it was about $17 (Australian)... presumably a bit more for being conveniently available in the hotel lobbies. And worth every penny!

I highly recommend forwarding your luggage at any opportunity, and just carrying hand luggage between places. It's quick, efficient, inexpensive and easy.

Please note that there's no need to pre-arrange for forwarding either. As long as you have the address you need to send to with you, there will always be a desk and an opportunity to just step up and forward.

Holy cow, baggage forwarding sounds like a miracle! Thanks so much for your answers and for that nice story about sending bags around. I can't believe that something so practical and awesome even exists.