The Worth of Books

Going through the many old and new problems attendant on moving out of Japan, I discovered that Japan Post has a new policy that prohibits sending anything valued at over a hundred US dollars to the US. This is in retaliation to Trump's tariff policies but this is such a new rule that the post office web site doesn't mention it, even though one is required to make labels for all international shipping on the web site before going into the post office. Many employees of the post office are unaware of the rule, too, which means some parcels I'd already sent off end up being returned to me.

This is a problem for me because my last day in this apartment is to-morrow, Monday, and my flight leaves on Wednesday. This means I suddenly have to figure out what to do with a bunch of stuff I thought I'd already taken care of, most of it valuable stuff I didn't want to get rid of. Mostly I'm talking about books.

What books do I have that are so valuable? Well, the sad irony here is that this is a result of me personally setting a high value on books. When the label web site tells me it's mandatory for me to ascribe a monetary value to all objects contained in the parcel, I'm forced to put a price on items that could be valued very differently depending on the buyer and seller. If you collect old books, like I do, then a hardback copy of Bleak House printed in the 1940s is surely worth at least forty dollars. To people who believe books are antiquated objects now made obsolete by digital media, my copy of Bleak House is worth less than an equivalent quantity of blank paper. So I could have been justified in filling in all the price fields with one or two yen. Fool that I am, I wrote what I thought the books were actually worth.

All this to get revenge on Trump. It goes to show, revenge is never quite as simple as you'd like it to be.

And, oh yeah, Happy Easter.