A freight ship container bearing 31,000 items of mail from the United States remained forgotten and unattended for five weeks in the port of Yokohama until last Friday, Japanese wire service Kyodo reported yesterday. Some 90% of the mail in the container consists of catalogs and other commercial publications.
The Tokyo Regional Bureau of Postal Services said the container was one of four mail containers shipped on a freighter that departed New Jersey on Feb. 19 and reached Yokohama on March 30.
Three of the four containers were bound for the ministry’s international mail center in Tokyo, which was to deliver the mail in the containers to areas under its jurisdiction.
But the center mistakenly arranged for only two of the three containers to be trucked in to the center and was unaware that the third had to be brought as well, the officials said.
It was only last Friday that a trucking company found that the third container had been left unattended and forgotten on the premises of a container terminal in the port of Yokohama, it said.
The blunder was one of the biggest of its kind to befall international mail entering Japan. The bureau said it will quickly arrange for the neglected mail to be delivered with a note of apology.
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