Was flying into Narita once and I had checked luggage in part because I was carrying an award for a Japanese customer. I was sort of given a "we'll get back to you sooner or later." At which point I explained the situation to a supervisor I think and was much fluttering around and got the bag the next day.
Most airlines do eventually find the bag, and if you kept in touch they'll usually even get it to where you are, even if you've since returned.
Thanks, going to borrow your words there for my civil engineering friends.
Well no, but it does have other significant construction problems! https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/japans-20b-kansai-airport...
Lots of orgs claim to aspire to 5 nines of uptime but can barely manage 2 nines. Kansai airport with an average of about 17 million pax/yr [0] hasn't lost any luggage. Losing one item out of, say, 10 million items a year, would be 7 nines.
[0] https://www.kansai-airports.co.jp/en/business/in-figures/
But it wasn't the airport's fault - my luggage was still in Amsterdam.
Arrived <24 hours later and they delivered it to my hotel in Osaka.
They very seriously apologized for breaking my bag. They asked me how much it had cost. I said "around $40, it was just something cheap". A minute later I was sort of ceremoniously handed an envelope with japanese yen notes worth that much.
Obviously, nobody ever offered a compensation.
There is no wonder that such things happen, because at many airports I have seen how the baggage handlers throw the baggage through the air into the vehicles that carry the baggage to the airplanes, even over a distance of a few meters, instead of depositing it gently into the vehicle. Therefore I never put anything fragile in a checked baggage.
> After the luggage is unloaded and collected in the cargo handling area upon arrival at the airport, ground support personnel manually align the handles of the bags and place them on the conveyor belt.
That's a level of attention to detail that we should be striving for in everything we build.
Zero lost suitcases doesn't require magic to achieve. It just requires enough workers or enough time to make sure each worker is able to do their job successfully. Unfortunately financial and time constraints mean that very often there aren't enough workers or enough time, and some passengers suffer.
In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.
(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)
The TSA is security theater, a vast majority of American jobs seem to be competence theater. You only ever tend to see care and craft in small business and actual crafts. It's so rare that it's incredibly refreshing to find anyone in any business that bothers to do good work and take care of the small things.
It's not about respecting the baggage handlers. It's about a culture where you respect yourself such that you are obliged to do the best work you can, whether it's baggage handling, being a CEO, or flipping burgers. Self respect and respect for the job far outweigh any notion of employers or other citizens respecting baggage handlers. They have sophisticated notions of status and face and place in society that are sadly absent in American culture.
You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
Its like the news reports that say "an officers weapon was discharged and someone died at the scene", rather than "a cop shot and killed a guy".
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.
However, at the airport, when flying back home I had an unexpected experience. At my final destination, when I retrieved my checked baggage in the airport, it no longer had the padlock that it had at check in, in Japan.
I assume that this happened because at the airport, after check in, they have cut the padlock, to inspect the baggage. I also assume that the inspection was caused by a big kitchen knife that was in the baggage. The kitchen knife had been bought from a shop from Osaka, and it was well sealed inside the original package closed by the shop, but this would not be seen at an X-ray machine.
There was nothing else in the baggage that could be suspicious. In any case, if they inspected the baggage to check the knife, it was done carefully, and the content of the baggage was in the exact same positions as after packing.
Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.
I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:
> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.
I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.
aapoalas•2h ago
The Kansai airport immigration office uttered a lot of "oohs" and "eehs", but they came through and in less than 45 minutes my appeal for deportation was accepted and I was granted a 1 year student visa. Always makes me happy when I pass through there :)
kylecazar•2h ago
aapoalas•1h ago
unscaled•1h ago
But Japan is working quite differently from other countries here, so you're probably not the first person to be confused, although I don't think any country issues a long-term visa that is not stamped on your passport.
dathinab•1h ago
I don't think this was their "strategy", but more like a "young people are sometimes clueless and fail to take care of necessary things with enough buffer ahead of time" situations.
And that (student + exchange program + in general eligible for a visa) is why it turned out well. Not sure if it still would do so today. The "cheap yen" tourism boom might have brought in money, but also a lot of annoyance with unpleasant tourists amplified by how modern recommendation algorithms work (you see all the rage bait "a tourist behaved mean" and non "normal tourist is polite and does nothing strange") and various propaganda amplifying this. In general there seem to be a ton of "make cities look way worse wrt. safety and cleanliness and blame it on tourists/immigrants/minorities" videos across most western countries in recent times (not just JP, e.g. London has a lot of such nonsense, it's quite safe, but if you ask ticktock it's a lawless crime zone. ).
protonbob•1h ago
https://crimerate.co.uk/london
That is more than Chicago.
> In June 2025, there were 631 reported incidents (23.2 per 100,000) – a 49% reduction from the August 2023 peak.
https://counciloncj.org/crime-in-chicago-what-you-need-to-kn...