Japan Post (日本郵政公社, Nippon Yūsei Kōsha) is a dominant postal and package delivery company in Japan. It was once Postal Services Agency (郵政省; yūseisho), a division of the Japanese government.

The company was born on April 2, 2003 as public corporation from the Postal Services Agency, which was part of the current Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's reform plans. As of 2003, the president of the company is Masaharu Ikuta, formerly chairman of Mitsui O.S.K. Lines Ltd. It has 280,504 employees and runs 24,700 post offices throughtout Japan.

More than a postal service, its banking unit holds ¥224 trillion ($2.1 trillion) of household assets in its yu-cho savings accounts, and its insurance unit holds ¥126 trillion ($1.2 trillion) of household assets in its kampo life insurance services as of 2003. Household assets in Japan was ¥1,400 trillion ($13.1 trillion) in 2003, while US household financial assets was $30.4 trillion ([1]).

The privatization of the company, particularly its postal services division is a decade-long political matter in Japan. Quite a number of people, including Junichiro Koizumi, back the plan while there are strong political oppositions within both of largest partities, LDP and DPJ to it. The Cabinet has announced on September 2003 that they have planned to divide the company into four, which are postal services, postal savings services, postal life insurance services and window networks (post offices), and privatize each on April 2007.

See also

• Japanese addressing system
• Package delivery

External links

• Company Website
  • Post
  • Bank
  • Insurance
• Yahoo! - Japan Post Company Profile