Last August, my boyfriend and I went to Japan. Somewhere between the food, the temples, and the kind of heat that makes you rethink leaving the hotel, I had one small mission: bring back really good matcha for my sister.

This was 2025, right in the middle of the TikTok matcha boom. Suddenly everyone in the US wanted to make matcha lattes at home, and good matcha had turned into a genuinely hard-to-find commodity: prices were climbing and a lot of it was just sold out. So while we were in Kyoto, we made a point of stopping by Ippodo, one of the famous matcha makers there.

The shortage had clearly reached them too, because they were limiting purchases to one can per person. We went around 2pm, and my boyfriend and I each bought a can (one of them turned out to be the very last can of that flavor). Walking out with two cans at all felt like a small miracle.

Unfortunately, that feeling did not last.

Realizing I’d lost it

I didn’t notice anything was wrong until I got home and started unpacking. I went looking for the matcha to give to my sister, and it was missing.

It took me a minute to retrace my steps, and then I remembered I’d left the bag at a sushi restaurant in Kyoto. By this point it had been about a week since we ate there and I’d already flown across an ocean. I figured that was that and it was lost to the void forever.

Googling my way into a dead end

Still, I figured Japan must have some kind of system for this. So I started searching for how to recover a lost item in Japan and ship it home.

There is basically nothing helpful if you’re a non-Japanese speaker sitting on the other side of the world. I found a few forum posts from other tourists, most of which ended with some version of “yeah, never got it back.” I also found a couple of personal-concierge type services, but they gave off a weird vibe: pay a stranger, no clear process, no real guarantee you’d get anything. I didn’t love the idea of losing money and the matcha.

At this point I’d mostly made peace with the fact that the matcha was gone.

Japan being Japan

My boyfriend has a friend who was living in Tokyo and learning Japanese, so we asked if he’d be willing to call the restaurant and just ask if they still had it. It had been over a week, so I was fully expecting a polite “sorry, no.”

He called, and they still had it! They’d just been holding onto my two cans of matcha this whole time, waiting for someone to come get them.

I’d read about Japan being a high-trust society, but it’s different when it actually happens to you. A random sushi restaurant held onto a tourist’s forgotten tea for a week!

There was one catch: the restaurant could hold the matcha, but they couldn’t ship it overseas. And our friend was in Tokyo, not Kyoto, so asking him to make a 3 hour bullet train just to pick up two cans of tea felt like way too much. So the matcha was safe, confirmed, and somehow still completely out of my reach.

Hiring a stranger on the Japanese TaskRabbit

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to think of options. Is there a Japanese Craigslist? Do I post on Reddit? Do I just… fly back?

Eventually I found an app called ANYTIMES, which is basically Japan’s version of TaskRabbit — you post a task and people apply to do it. Cleaning, furniture assembly, errands, that kind of thing. There’s almost no English support; the whole app is in Japanese. But between Chrome’s auto-translate and using Gemini to help me write messages in Japanese, I figured I could manage. (This is not sponsored in any way, btw.)

So I made an account and wrote up a listing. Finding the right category was its own little problem, because there is obviously no option for “please go retrieve the matcha I left at a specific sushi restaurant and mail it to America.” I filed it under Other > Other and set the price at ¥5,000.

The listing, in my Gemini-assisted Japanese, was titled 京都のレストランから抹茶を受け取り、アメリカへ発送してほしい — “I’d like someone to pick up matcha from a restaurant in Kyoto and ship it to the US.” I kept the details simple: the matcha’s confirmed to be at this restaurant, just pick it up and ship it, and I’ll cover all the costs.

The first person to apply wanted ¥12,000, more than double what I’d posted and more than the matcha itself cost. I passed on that one and waited.

Aki

A few days later I got a second application, from someone I’ll call Aki, who wasn’t far from Kyoto. She agreed to my original price, and said she could ship as early as Wednesday if that worked. It did.

Our entire back-and-forth happened through the app’s chat, with me running everything through Google Translate. Even so, Aki was wonderful. She called the restaurant herself to confirm the matcha was still there, booked a pickup for the next day, and suggested Japan Post international airmail with tracking, reasonably priced at about 6–10 days.

She picked up the matcha on September 9th, sent me photos of both cans safe and sound, and shipped everything the next day with the customs form filled out. She even told me not to worry about paying until the package arrived and I’d confirmed it was fine — a lot of trust for a ¥5,000 task from an internet stranger.

The total damage

Adding it all up:

• ANYTIMES task fee: ¥5,000
• Packaging: ¥330
• Japan Post international airmail: ¥4,200

That’s ¥9,530, or roughly $65, to recover two cans of matcha. Given what matcha was selling for in the US at the time, that came out to about break-even.

It arrived

On September 19th, I got the Japan Post notification that delivery was complete. Both cans showed up in perfect condition, all the way from Kyoto to my door in San Jose.

My sister got her matcha and had absolutely no idea about the small international operation it took to get it to her. When I told her the story later, she just looked at me like I’d lost it, which is fair.

From this experience, I took away a few things:

• Japan really is that high-trust. The restaurant held my matcha for over a week without a second thought.
• If you Googled “how to get a lost item back from Japan” and landed here — there aren’t many good English resources, but this one worked for me. Hopefully it works for you too.
• ANYTIMES is a real option when you need someone in Japan and have nobody local to ask. It’s all in Japanese, so lean on Chrome translate and an AI to write your messages — and don’t be afraid to file your request under “Other.”
• Sometimes the slightly ridiculous option is the right one. Everyone told me to just let it go, it’s only tea. But it was good tea, it was my sister’s tea, and I got it back.

Thank you, Aki. And thank you to the sushi restaurant, Japan Post, and the friend who made that first phone call. The matcha, for the record, was excellent.