gifts to unknown address overseas

Hi everyone,

I live in Japan and I have friends and relatives who live overseas (U.S., Spain etc.). I know their email addresses, but they won't tell me their snail-mail addresses. Is it possible to send gifts to them? If so, can anyone recommend me a reliable company that does it?

For example, Sagawa-kyubin provides a nice service called Meru-ado-takuhai in which you can send almost anything you want to people of whom you only know their email addresses of, but this service applies only for those in Japan.

The internet tells me about similar services overseas, but they usually make you choose from their not-so-attractive catalog of items. So I wondered if anyone can give me advise based on their experiences.

Thank you in advance.

I hope my question is being noticed. Anyone?

Hi Uco,

I always enjoy reading your posts on japan-guide, thanks for all the useful answers!

I've never heard of a service like this (in Australia) and would be surprised if it was possible due to our privacy laws. I suspect the same applies to many Western countries. Also, perhaps the Japanese e-mail addresses are linked to a mobile phone account, or an interent service provider, so they would have the user's physical address. In Australia many people use various free e-mail providers like hotmail, yahoo, gmail etc. where you don't even have to provide your real name, let alone an address.

Perhaps you can use other techniques to track down their mailing address? Especially if you know their last name, or where they work, and what city they live in?

Good Luck!

GC3,

The way it works in Japan is that the sender and recipient never get to know each other's postal address, so in fact there is no privacy problem. The usual way the system works is for the delivery company to contact the recipient by e-mail to ask them if they want to receive the delivery, and if so to provide a postal address. The sender is not informed of the recipient's address and vice versa. Mixi users can send New Year cards to their contacts in the same way.

But back to the original question, I've never heard of a system like this being provided internationally.

Thanks for clarifying Dave!

I've not heard of that sort of service, unfortunately.

I don't mean to sound rude but if they do not want to give you their addresses, maybe you should respect that theyh also do not want gifts from you? Perhaps just be clear in your next email that you would like to send a gift and please could they tell you their postal address? Otherwise sounds a bit stalker-ish to me :)

I've never heard of such a service either. Perhaps you can do it the old-fashioned way with poste restante? You could ask the person the name of the city/town/village where they are living (or, if they're very secretive, that of one they can easily go to) and look up addresses of local post offices. Then you could tell the person you'd be sending a package for them to Post Office XY, and they'd pick it up there. That's my only suggestion, sorry.

Thanks to everyone so far, especially Pirilampo. I never thought about sending things to a post office, but come to think of it, that's what you do to send things to travellers. I suppose I can phone my local central post office for more details. One thing that bugs me, however, is that the recipients will need to be going all the way to the post office just to recieve the parcels. I will have to think about it.

And thank you Dave for clarifying about the service. I don't think this service is well-known even in Japan. At least I didn't know about it until I received an email from the service telling me an old friend wants to send me a parcel. I found the experience fascinating.

To "." I know that one of the reasons my friends and relatives abroad don't tell me their parcel addresses is because they don't want me to feel obligated to send them gifts. They've done me favors and they know I owe them. I also don't intend to be pushy, and will certainly send them a note in advance if I am ever going to send anything, and I know for sure that they are the type of people that can say "no" if they want to. It's not at all the same as stalking.

Just for reference, this is the details for the domestic Meruado-takuhaibin service;
http://www.mailaddbin.com/