State of emergency declared for Tokyo area

January 7th (Thu), the prime minister of Japan has declared a second state of emergency for the Tokyo area. The measures cover Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama and Kanagawa, 4 prefectures that account for almost half of Japan's population, and for half of the covid contamination in Japan.

As you know, if you read our articles in March 2020, the state of emergency in Japan is merely a matter of recommendations, as there is no legal disposition that would allow the Japanese government to force its citizens to follow them. The recommendations are, for now, as follows (additional measures are expected in the next weeks):

- Restaurants, bars and other recreative facilities must close between 7 and 8 pm.
- Office work must go remote by 70% wherever possible.
- Limitations in public events attendance.
- The general population is requested to stay home as much as possible.

This second state of emergency is quite different from the first. The country is now well prepared, masks and disinfection equipment are widely available, and many companies have put in place the necessary measures to facilitate remote work.

At Seido, we are taking the following measures:
- We are now entirely closed to visits (we were accepting visitors on a one per one basis).
- Our opening hours are temporarily set to 10am~4.30pm.
- Shifts have been reduced to allow our staff to avoid crowded public transportation (although trains to our location are most of the time half-empty, and expected to even further empty during the state of emergency).

Remote work is not a simple measure to put in place at Seido, as our work is mainly to manufacture products and customization and pack orders to ship, we have decided not to establish remote work for the time being. This may be revised without prior notice, and if so, this article will be updated accordingly.

Shipping & Delivery

We still ship orders normally, as we have been doing for the past year.

Rest assured that there is no change in our capacity to ship and deliver your orders. Shipping conditions with all carriers remain the same, and if Japan Post shipments are still suspended in many countries (and notably Australia and the US), we can still deliver almost all countries in the world with FedEx, DHL and UPS, as we have been doing for the past months.
Additional "covid" fees charged by all carriers are still entirely supported by Seido and will not be charged at checkout. A flat 800 JPY (8 USD / 7 EUR) is charged at checkout for small orders (under 1 kg) with for destination a country that Japan Post cannot serve.

Thank you very much for your continued support and understanding!
Please stay safe and take care.