On Jul 5, 3:35 am, John <gh14...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My wife and I are moving from Japan to the U.S. in August.  We probably
> have about 3-4 cubic meters of stuff to ship.

Having just done something similar, I suspect that your guestimate
might well end up being about 6-7 cubic meters.... And that was after
dumping all furniture, large quantities of books *sob*, and lots of
junk we'd accumulated over the years.

> Any suggestions on good
> shipping companies that won't bust the budget?

That might depend on where you are currently, but I'd recommend
Economove, apart from one major proviso....

I see you got recommended door-to-terminal, and I'd now second that.
We thought that door-to-door with full packing and unpacking would be
the least hassle, and in fact it was... right up to the last step.

Door-to-door might work well if you live near the port of entry---but
it now seems easy enough to contact a local haulers to take the
shipment from the warehouse to your new home. The Japanese agents
would have little control over the agents they use at the other end of
the journey.

In our case, we don't live near the obvious ports of entry for the UK,
and the UK agents kept our shipment for nearly three months in their
warehouse while they were "looking for the best way" to ship it the
rest of the way. I suspect they hadn't even looked at the destination
address before agreeing to do the job (and they also have a weird way
of "answering" email by writing the email address out by hand into a
data entry form, before typing it back into the computer---with the
obvious problems of errors creeping in). And then they failed to tell
the company they finally did find to ship it that we'd specified full
unpacking. </rant>



> Also, does any one know
> the customs procedures for shipping personal/household items to the
> U.S.?  I've been searching around the internet, but customs information
> is not easy to find and confusing at best.

Sorry, can't help you there. But that part was painfree for us,
shipping to the UK (although the guys who eventually delivered the
boxes did express surprise that nothing had been opened by customs).
The agents at both ends took care of that.


>
> Thanks,
> John