The Precarious Future of the Beloved Post Box

Postal System in Flux

I love letters. Over my career as a journalist, it has been my custom to write thank-you notes the day after meeting with or interviewing people. For me, the act of writing a letter helps fix the individual and their story in my mind.

It is easy, then, to understand my shock at hearing of Denmark’s plan to remove all its mailboxes by year’s end. For generations, the postal system has played a crucial role in connecting people through hand-delivered mail. However, there is no denying that with the rise of digital communication, fewer and fewer people today have cause to write letters. As a result, mail delivery, a nationwide service and bulwark of society that was once taken for granted, now stands at a crossroads.

The Danish postal system dates to 1624, making it far older than Japan’s, which began running between Tokyo and Osaka in 1871. It was established by Christian IV, the king of Denmark and Norway, who put in place nine postal routes to ensure effective military communications during the bloody Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).

The service was initially exclusive to the upper classes, but the postal system quickly expanded with the democratization of Denmark following its transition to constitutional monarchy in 1849. Under the legal framework of Universal Service Obligation (USO), which ensures all citizens have access to basic and essential services, postal usage in Denmark soared, peaking in the late 1990s.

Today, Denmark boasts one of the world’s most digitalized governments. Public authorities and citizens are able to communicate securely online through the dedicated smartphone app Digital Post, making all interactions and exchanges of information fully digital.

Needless to say, this digital transformation has caused mail volume to drop off precipitously. According to PostNord, a postal service provider co-run by the Danish and Swedish governments, letter deliveries in Denmark have plummeted over 90% since 2000, going from 1.45 billion to just 110 million in 2024. With the service irretrievably in the red, the Danish government last January amended its postal legislation, doing away with USO. PostNord is slated to exit the letter delivery business by year’s end and will shift focus to the booming parcel delivery sector.

The private Danish delivery company Dao will take over letter delivery from next year, with the company’s 1,500 shops nationwide accepting mail in lieu of post boxes. One positive outcome is that the cost of sending a letter will actually drop from 29 Danish kroner to 23 kroner, or a little more three and a half US dollars.

Keeping Mail Delivery Afloat

The steady liberalization of postal systems across Europe since the late 1990s has raised concerns that costly deliveries to remote and rural areas will be cast by the wayside. USO was adopted as a cornerstone of consumer protection to prevent this, but it is facing a moment of reckoning in many European countries that have not followed Denmark’s lead in embracing digitalization.

Across Europe, governments are struggling to make USO more financially sustainable. In Britain, for instance, Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský recently acquired the parent company of Royal Mail and is pushing to reduce second-class letter delivery to a few days a week, among other cuts. France, too, is removing underused mailboxes and mulling cutbacks like eliminating Saturday deliveries.

In Japan, the postal system faces similar challenges. The volume of mail has fallen by more than half since a peak of 26.3 billion items in fiscal 2001, with 12.5 billion items passing through the system last year. Currently, nearly two decades since the postal service was privatized in 2007, Japan still maintains some 20,000 post offices and 170,000 mailboxes nationwide. However, many among this army of mailboxes are presumed to be unnecessary, as demonstrated by a 2023 survey that revealed soberingly that the postal system had 6,800 mailboxes that went completely unused or received just one letter per month.

In addition, Japan Post has recently found itself in hot water for failing to conduct mandatory health and sobriety checks on drivers, with the government in response handing down a five-year operation suspension on 2,500 trucks in June, which it may extended to some delivery vans.

Even with all its speed and convenience, though, email lacks the warmth of a handwritten, hand-delivered letter. One could say that amid humanity’s ongoing drive to streamline everything, the intimate act of letter writing is more necessary than ever. The question remains, however, if Japan’s iconic red mailboxes can retain their status, or like Denmark’s, will disappear from street corners.

(Originally published in Japanese. Banner photo © Pixta.)