The OnBoard Courier for Japan

After it come Tokyo (NRT) with 117 destinations and about 361.5 departures a day, Fukuoka (FUK) with 47 destinations and about 294.4 departures a day, Osaka (KIX) with 70 destinations and about 267.1 departures a day, Chitose / Tomakomai (CTS) with 40 destinations and about 262.7 departures a day and Naha (OKA) with 35 destinations and about 212 departures a day. Those are the alternates. When the primary gateway is shut by weather, a strike or a curfew, they are what a courier is rebooked through. Between them the 8 airports in Japan that publish departures schedule about 2,471.3 movements a day and reach 486 separate destinations, counting each city once per airport.

Reach matters more than frequency for a hand carry, because a courier flies whatever is leaving. From HND alone, 1,652 airports are reachable with exactly one change, on top of the 105 served nonstop. A gateway that multiplies its own reach that far with one change is a hub in the useful sense: almost anywhere is two boarding passes away. It is computed from the scheduled network rather than from a booking engine.

65 per cent of everything scheduled to leave the country stays inside it, across 65 domestic destinations. That matters on a hand carry because it decides whether the last leg can be flown or has to be driven. A consignee outside the gateway city is then a connecting flight, not a four hour drive.

Outside its own borders the country is tied most closely to South Korea, about 248.2 flights a day, Taiwan, about 126.7 flights a day, China, about 106.7 flights a day, the United States, about 83.3 flights a day and Hong Kong, about 79.7 flights a day. Those are the markets a courier can reach from Japan without a long connection, and they are also where a third country leg most often starts: an item that has to go from Japan to somewhere with no direct service usually travels through one of them.

124 airlines fly out of Japan in this data. Counted by how many of the country's routes each one appears on, the widest networks belong to ANA on 177 routes, Jet Linx Aviation on 98 routes, Peach Aviation on 50 routes, Jetstar Japan on 30 routes and Skymark Airlines on 24 routes. The carrier matters to a hand carry more than it does to freight, because cabin baggage rules, what counts as an acceptable carry on item and whether an extra seat can be bought are set by the airline and not by the airport.

The longest single sector out of HND in this data runs to Panama City Beach, United States (ECP), 11,276 km by great circle. Great circle is not a flown distance and will read short against a real routing, but it is the honest way to state a reach: it says what one aircraft does without stopping, which is exactly the question a courier desk is asking.

Japan runs 5h ahead of Dubai. That is why the departure chosen matters more than the flight time: the same sector can land inside the consignee's working day or an hour after it closed, depending on which bank the courier makes. At this offset the working days overlap for only part of the afternoon, which is the window a signature has to land in. The desk works the arrival backwards from the moment the recipient can sign, not forwards from the moment the item is ready.

Night restrictions are recorded for NRT: NRT between 23:00 and 06:00 local. A late evening departure that slips past the start of one of those windows does not go until the morning, which on an urgent consignment is not a delay of an hour but of a working day. Those hours apply to scheduled movements, exemptions and seasonal variations exist, and the desk checks them against the airport and the carrier before it books rather than relying on the list.

Hand carry demand is not spread evenly across a country, it sits where something expensive stops when a part is missing. The industrial geography file behind this site records 1 such site in Japan, across automotive: Toyota at Toyota City, Aichi. These are public manufacturing and research sites, named as the reason a lane exists. Nothing here says any of them is a customer of any courier operator.

Take the first of them. Toyota at Toyota City, Aichi: Assembly, the group head office and the production system that named itself. Nagoya is the aerospace and automotive gate of Japan. That is the shape of the work in Japan, and it is why the airports above matter more than the distance does.

This site publishes 18 lane pages that cross the border of Japan. Leaving Japan: Tokyo to Aguascalientes, Tokyo to Frankfurt, Tokyo to Leon, Tokyo to San Francisco and Tokyo to Vancouver. Arriving: Abu Dhabi to Tokyo, Bangkok to Tokyo, Doha to Tokyo, Dubai to Osaka, Dubai to Tokyo, Frankfurt to Tokyo, Hong Kong to Tokyo and Milan to Tokyo.

Each of those has its own page with the flying time, the gateway pair and what actually moves on it. Read together they say something the individual pages do not: the places Japan is connected to on this desk are Abu Dhabi, Bangkok, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Milan, Paris, Seattle and Seoul, plus 5 more. A lane page exists because the traffic on it is real, not because the pair looked plausible on a map.

Counting what is already published, this site holds 8 city pages, 8 standalone city pages, 8 Atlas entries, 2 airport pages, 18 lane pages and 8 trade and history pages for Japan, and every one of them is linked from this page. That is the point of a country index: the material exists, it was written one page at a time, and until now there was no single place that connected it.

Alongside the reference material there is the country desk page, the entry and formalities guide, the travel and connections page and the courier recruitment page for people who already fly this market. The country page sells, the city pages answer, and the lane pages price. They are kept apart because a reader arrives at exactly one of those three questions and merging them would bury the other two.