[Dx-qsl] QSL Cards

Wed Jun 13 20:49:19 EDT 2007

Just some thoughts:
In most countries, international postal service directives are written
in their official language(s) and French. At least in Japan, Sweden,
Germany, etc. English-written directives are also getting de-facto
popularity (AIR MAIL, SMALL PACKET, etc.), at least in Japan. 
In JA most of the Japan Post workers do not read foreign languages,
though they can read roman-alphabet-written Japanese. I once saw a
visitor from Germany was writing DOITSU (means Germany in Japanese) at
the destination address part of the postcard to ensure correct delivery.
I do notice the destination area in Japanese Kanji/Kana letters to
ensure at least the least-experienced postal worker understand the
destination area of the world, especially if I write the address in
non-roman-alphabet-nor-Kanji/Hanja/Hanyu/Hanzi letters such as in
Hangul or Cyrillic letters. 
Some Japan Post workers even confuse Austria and Australia, or the Japan
Post region diffence between Guam, USA, Hawaii, USA, and California,
USA. So you need to learn a lot from Japan Post's Web page before
sending a SASE. :)
Recently my SAE to an Ukrainian station included Ukrainian Cyrillic name
of Japan (which is slightly different of the Russian Cyrillic name). I
think that worked well because I got the card :) Since modern computers
are all equipped with Unicode, you can at least see how foreign letters
are and make a legible copy of a word in those letters.
I see no valid excuse on not including a sufficient return postage if
the sender wants the direct reply (though in many cases the postage
included is stolen).
73
// Kenji Rikitake, JJ1BDX(/3)