>>9777445Not enough Planes moving in and out of the country. SAL requires a certain amount of Planes with left over cargo capacity that would otherwise go to waste to function, as no such thing exists SAL cannot function so that service is suspended. EMS has priority over SAL as far as filling Planes go but has the same basic issue, no Planes. Both services were designed to piggyback off of frequent international flight services and cannot function while travel is restricted.
As for the pricing, the cost of doing business in many parts of the world, but particularly in the US, has simply just gone up. Part of that is inflation and in this case part of that is also the falling value of the Yen, costs are increasing but the value of the money that JP Post is getting paid is also decreasing.
Think of it like this(and note that this is a very hazy example with fake numbers); say that it used to cost 1000 yen to send something to the US, 750 yen of costs and 250 yen profit. The 750 yen was converted to USD to pay the US based carrier to handle delivery and that came out to 7.50USD at the time. That worked out for a while but then inflation hit, now the US based carrier wants 10USD and even worse the value of the Yen has fallen so that 1000 yen can't even cover the full cost, 1000 yen is now only worth 7.50USD, so JP Post have to raise their prices and as they don't want to fight a battle of constantly raising prices they have to raise them substantially.
