Hi this is mochi!
In Japan you get a lot of junk mail. Are you annoyed by that too? You have to search for the mail that actually came for you and your table or garbage box gets full so quickly.
Those junk mail posters get paid per brochure so they don’t care about your feelings, they just want to deliver as many as possible.
BUT you can reduce them! Here are 3 ways to reduce the junk mail delivered to your mailbox:
FIRST: Put a “no flyers” sticker
If you use this sticker you probably won’t get brochures and menus from pizza delivery or other big companies – it seems like big companies tell the distributors not to put their flyers in boxes that have those stickers – but you might still get real estate or some other careless company’s junk mail.
We use this one. We used to get 3 or more ads per day, but after adding this sticker we get less than 5 per month. Totally worth the money!
SECOND: “We will send flyers back COD”
If you try the FIRST method but there is still some junk mail you want to stop, I recommend to add this sentence to your mailbox:
もし投函した場合、警察に通報したうえ広告主に着払いで返送いたします。
If you post, we will call the police and then send brochures back to the company with postage due at delivery (COD)
The people who get paid to stuff mailboxes doesn’t want problems with the police or the client company complaining. BUT I recommend that you don’t actually send flyers back. If the company rejects the letter you might have to pay for the shipping.
THIRD: Call them
If you can’t stop the junk mail with stickers you can call and ask the company to leave you alone.
You can stop community newspaper delivery too
When you’re away from home for a business trip or a long vacation you can arrange to stop your mail, but you probably don’t want you mailbox to be full from the city/ward newspapers. In that the case you can call the phone number on the paper and tell them to stop the delivery for security reasons. You probably have to do this in Japanese.
