THE MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS
Picked up from your home in response to a telephone call and delivered the next day. At a time when the only options were parcel post and rail freight, the "Kuroneko-Yamato Courier (Yamato Transport)" service caused a revolution in the transport business. This service, which started with two packages on January 20, 1976, soon grew into an industry handling several hundreds of millions of packages per year. The service removed the inconvenience of rigid packing and the tying up of packages with string, making it easy for people equipped only with sticky tape to send off packages. Mothers could send food from home to their children living alone, flowers could be sent on Mother's Day, skis or golf clubs could be sent ahead allowing people to enjoy traveling light, and books purchased from a bookshop could be delivered to a person's home. The arrival of the courier service made the sending of packages a familiar activity. A background to this service was the establishment of the network of highways and the advancement of computer network systems.