Black Cat

The Japanese people are masters at "packing lightly."  This fact becomes apparent as soon as you board the plane from Hawaii to Tokyo.  You won't wait an hour for everyone to walk on with their oversized carry-on luggage as they try to avoid paying the airline baggage fee.  Instead, passengers have come to Hawaii for vacation so they are returning home to Japan with no carry-on luggage at all.  In fact, most of them have only small shopping bags of omiyage they have purchased at the airport. 

Hold up, I think I already wrote that whole story about loading the plane with large pieces of luggage in a previous blog post.  That must really be bothering me!!!

Anyway, the same trend continues with small suitcases on the trains and subways as the Japanese travel from different areas of Japan for various reasons.  Most of them have miniature, hard case rolling suitcases.  So how are we, a family of 4, supposed to move to our next hotel when we each have a large suitcase?  Hmmmmm, that's 4 oversized American suitcases that are packed to capacity!

It's Black Cat luggage service to the rescue!  We usually spend two weeks on each trip to Tokyo where we stay at more than one hotel.  During our most recent trip, we stayed at 4 different hotels which meant moving 3 times during our stay.  On the day before we are moving to our next hotel, we bring our suitcases to the front desk and fill out paperwork for Black Cat services.  They transport our bags to our next hotel.  In most cases, our suitcases meet us the next day as we check in, or are waiting for us in our new room.  This service is extremely convenient as we don't have to struggle with our suitcases in the extremely crowded train stations. 

This is the Black Cat truck waiting outside our hotel when we stayed near Tokyo Disneyland.  You can see the familiar logo that represents the Yamoto Transport Co., Ltd.  The logo reveals a black mother cat carrying her kitten in her mouth which represents the promise that the company will take care of items entrusted to them as though they were part of their family. 


The price of transporting each suitcases depends on the distance between hotels.  On average, we paid $15/suitcase.  We usually kept one suitcase with us since we would have to send our luggage the day before our move.  This alleviated the stress of riding the trains and subways with heavy luggage.

The Black Cat service was also used to deliver our pocket Wifi.  When arriving at our first hotel, we were handed our pocket Wifi in an envelope.  Enclosed will be another envelope that you will place your pocket Wifi in during check out.  The hotel will send the Wifi back to Japan Wireless.

The pocket Wifi also comes with a portable battery.

The tag containing the yellow Black Cat sticker was attached to our suitcase we had delivered to our hotel.  The tan envelope was provided by Japan Wireless when sending back their rented Pocket Wifi.

The Black Cat (Kuro Neko) service is definitely important when traveling to different parts of Tokyo!