(japannews.yomiuri.co.jp)
> After the luggage is unloaded and collected in the cargo handling area upon arrival at the airport, ground support personnel manually align the handles of the bags and place them on the conveyor belt.
That's a level of attention to detail that we should be striving for in everything we build.
Zero lost suitcases doesn't require magic to achieve. It just requires enough workers or enough time to make sure each worker is able to do their job successfully. Unfortunately financial and time constraints mean that very often there aren't enough workers or enough time, and some passengers suffer.
The TSA is security theater, a vast majority of American jobs seem to be competence theater. You only ever tend to see care and craft in small business and actual crafts. It's so rare that it's incredibly refreshing to find anyone in any business that bothers to do good work and take care of the small things.
It's not about respecting the baggage handlers. It's about a culture where you respect yourself such that you are obliged to do the best work you can, whether it's baggage handling, being a CEO, or flipping burgers. Self respect and respect for the job far outweigh any notion of employers or other citizens respecting baggage handlers. They have sophisticated notions of status and face and place in society that are sadly absent in American culture.
You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
This places the blame solely on the workers. Their CEO earns a ludicrous multiple of their wage. They are treated like shit and are expendable. It’s a two way street, treat workers with respect and and you might get some respect from them.
> You could take the Kansai airport baggage handler team and drop them into any airline in the world, and they'd perform to the same high standard. Take any halfass United Airline baggage team and drop them at Kansai and they'd be breaking guitars, killing dogs, and all the other usual shenanigans just like back at home, and they wouldn't give a flying rat's behind about how their employer respects them or not. They're there for paychecks. Respect doesn't even enter into consideration.
The hypothetical of dropping one baggage team into another airport might be true in an immediate timeframe but it doesn't address the core issue - each team was formed in a completely different society, one values celebrity and quick-buck scamming, one values planting trees that cast shade long after you're dead. Pretending like the influential people who steer the most economic activity aren't to blame at all for that difference in culture is insane, especially when we have a felon president who has been pardoning many high profile fraudsters.
Expecting excellence, putting care and craft into your work, is something that is taught, it doesn't just magically happen.
Paying these same workers more would not noticeably improve outcomes, people would still lose luggage, steal shit, and then have even more money to spend.
The workers and the CEO are products of their culture, and without some sort of specific intervention against the outcomes wrought by those cultural influences, things would continue as before. Serious institutions indoctrinate their members and build a culture oriented around expectations of excellence and care and craft.
Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
That doesn't change unless the culture changes, which would change the regulatory environment, which would allow for things like excellent service and quality to be valued accordingly. America doesn't value excellence, it values "number go up."
> Such institutions can't compete in the marketplace we've set up, because it's cheaper to offer shitty service and low product quality, to keep employees expendable, low skill, low paid cogs, and to reward CEOs and management willing to screw over their fellow employees at every opportunity to ensure the number goes up.
The federal minimum wage has been the same since 2009, but In-N-Out is an example of a company that chooses to avoid blaming the worker or the market or the regulatory environment for all of their business difficulties. They choose to pay well over the California minimum wage, and I don't find it coincidental that I've had better experiences with employees there vs some other fast food locations. Costco has made similar choices with how they treat their employees and they're doing great. No regulation needed, just better leadership.
The CEOs that blame "inevitable" market forces on why they have to treat employees poorly while refusing to look inward will ironically lose out in the market. And at a larger scale, probably the countries too.
It is a cultural problem. Just paying a bit more won't fix it. By paying a bit more, you might be able to get a larger share of the limited portion of people in the society that care, but you're not changing the people fundamentally, just being more selective.
When your people feel respected and compensated, they work far better.
What a passive way to say executives kept a larger share of profits for themselves, forcing workers to be stressed and do a sub-optimal job.
Its like the news reports that say "an officers weapon was discharged and someone died at the scene", rather than "a cop shot and killed a guy".
This is a very limited view of why things don't work. The main issue in my experience is whether the company values the outcome and ensures focus on optimizing for it. That can include everything from adequate staffing to comp to training to management focus. (A lot of the last one.)
You can spend a huge amount of money and still get a crappy outcome. US healthcare provides a rich field of examples.
Paying individual workers more may have some benefits, but I think the key issue is usually overworking and burnout because the incremental cost of adding a whole new employee is way higher than just pressuring workers to do more work in the same time.
I read this as "profit focus"
In the sixties, the C-suite earned 21 times what the line worker did. In 2024 it's almost 300 times. So every single time you're dealing with a product that's been value-engineered to where it barely functions, or service people paid too little and empowered too little to actually help you, or stuck in a long ass line because they won't hire enough people, or stuck talking to some damn robot because people are expensive, it's beyond a safe bet that you have an executive or several to blame.
(We kind of have something like this in that shopping at Costco is considered "good" but lots of people won't admit they shop at Walmart - I'm sure they'll be bankrupt soon given how many people don't shop there!)
For a more applicable example of shame, buying "cheap Chinese crap" is usually looked down on by all demographics or alignments.
Same with "cheap Chinese crap" - everyone decries it, but apparently everyone is also buying it.
I'm sure it's a healthy blend of both, but IMO, if you want to see this actually change, the first thing to even make it tenable as a possibility is the owning classes need to let some money flow down the hierarchy. Like I'm sure we'll always have our misers, our people who refuse to spend a penny more for anything, but I think the vast majority of the time what drives people to shitty retailers selling crap-quality products is that most people are fucking broke.
Yes.
The price-driven market segment will never disappear and is an emergent property of human nature and the dynamics of a marketplace where prices are instantly comparable.
Plane tickets are way more affordable for nearly everyone than they used to be, but price competition is more savage than ever. The marketplace has spoken.
While I agree that concentration of wealth at the top is a major problem, I don't think that shaking loose that wealth will change the price dynamics of the airline industry in the slightest.
There's nitpicks people will find with a statement like this but I've never found anything like it.
I agree that there's an issue about western capitalism, but I don't think it's in the tension between middle management and craftspeople who take pride in their work. I think the problems arise at a higher level, with the modern-day aristocracy of the capitalist ownership class and the slice of the pie that they capture.
Was flying into Narita once and I had checked luggage in part because I was carrying an award for a Japanese customer. I was sort of given a "we'll get back to you sooner or later." At which point I explained the situation to a supervisor I think and was much fluttering around and got the bag the next day.
Most airlines do eventually find the bag, and if you kept in touch they'll usually even get it to where you are, even if you've since returned.
As a side-note, had a small kitchen fire with smoke damage last year and it was pretty obvious that, even though they were reasonably generous, the insurance adjuster, cleaning people, movers, etc. just wanted the whole process to go away so they could move on. They objected a bit to a few claims but, for the most part, spending $50K was nothing compared to the claims being reopened.
I've only ever had luggage delayed once, they gave me a little bag of toiletries and a couple hundred bucks and a few days later delivered the luggage; never demanded the money back.
There were a few insurance policy things that my adjuster pushed back on (no code upgrades) and there were a number of things that would have just been silly for me not to pay for when walls were being repaintedd and opened up. There was a fire inspector because of the size of the claim. But it was pretty reasonable overall--although of people wouldn't have had the available cash to do the whole job as it really needed o be done. And, given that a couple of contractors, saved my butt in the middle of the winter, I wasn't going to push back too hard.
Well no, but it does have other significant construction problems! https://www.aerotime.aero/articles/japans-20b-kansai-airport...
Thanks, going to borrow your words there for my civil engineering friends.
However, at the airport, when flying back home I had an unexpected experience. At my final destination, when I retrieved my checked baggage in the airport, it no longer had the padlock that it had at check in, in Japan.
I assume that this happened because at the airport, after check in, they have cut the padlock, to inspect the baggage. I also assume that the inspection was caused by a big kitchen knife that was in the baggage. The kitchen knife had been bought from a shop from Osaka, and it was well sealed inside the original package closed by the shop, but this would not be seen at an X-ray machine.
There was nothing else in the baggage that could be suspicious. In any case, if they inspected the baggage to check the knife, it was done carefully, and the content of the baggage was in the exact same positions as after packing.
I'd guess it's not the packaging, but a big piece of steel blocking the xray view.
If 360, I wonder does the operator perhaps not trust it?
Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.
I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:
> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.
I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.
But it wasn't the airport's fault - my luggage was still in Amsterdam.
Arrived <24 hours later and they delivered it to my hotel in Osaka.
The Kansai airport immigration office uttered a lot of "oohs" and "eehs", but they came through and in less than 45 minutes my appeal for deportation was accepted and I was granted a 1 year student visa. Always makes me happy when I pass through there :)
I don't think this was their "strategy", but more like a "young people are sometimes clueless and fail to take care of necessary things with enough buffer ahead of time" situations.
And that (student + exchange program + in general eligible for a visa) is why it turned out well. Not sure if it still would do so today. The "cheap yen" tourism boom might have brought in money, but also a lot of annoyance with unpleasant tourists amplified by how modern recommendation algorithms work (you see all the rage bait "a tourist behaved mean" and non "normal tourist is polite and does nothing strange") and various propaganda amplifying this. In general there seem to be a ton of "make cities look way worse wrt. safety and cleanliness and blame it on tourists/immigrants/minorities" videos across most western countries in recent times (not just JP, e.g. London has a lot of such nonsense, it's quite safe, but if you ask ticktock it's a lawless crime zone. ).
https://crimerate.co.uk/london
That is more than Chicago.
> In June 2025, there were 631 reported incidents (23.2 per 100,000) – a 49% reduction from the August 2023 peak.
https://counciloncj.org/crime-in-chicago-what-you-need-to-kn...
But Japan is working quite differently from other countries here, so you're probably not the first person to be confused, although I don't think any country issues a long-term visa that is not stamped on your passport.
Lots of orgs claim to aspire to 5 nines of uptime but can barely manage 2 nines. Kansai airport with an average of about 17 million pax/yr [0] hasn't lost any luggage. Losing one item out of, say, 10 million items a year, would be 7 nines.
[0] https://www.kansai-airports.co.jp/en/business/in-figures/
They very seriously apologized for breaking my bag. They asked me how much it had cost. I said "around $40, it was just something cheap". A minute later I was sort of ceremoniously handed an envelope with japanese yen notes worth that much.
Obviously, nobody ever offered a compensation.
There is no wonder that such things happen, because at many airports I have seen how the baggage handlers throw the baggage through the air into the vehicles that carry the baggage to the airplanes, even over a distance of a few meters, instead of depositing it gently into the vehicle. Therefore I never put anything fragile in a checked baggage.