Takkyubin. Yamato moves a suitcase hotel to hotel for ¥2,510 to ¥2,630 at the common 160 cm size, Tokyo to Kyoto included, arriving next day. Hand it to the front desk by about 10 a.m. the morning you leave and it is waiting at check-in the next afternoon. From Narita or Haneda the same bag costs the rate plus a ¥660 counter fee, about ¥3,170 to a Tokyo hotel next day; same-day from Haneda is ¥5,780 with an 11 a.m. cut-off.
Coin lockers and the big suitcase. Station lockers run ¥400 small to ¥700 or ¥800 large in Tokyo and Osaka, coin or IC card, and the large ones fill by mid-morning at Kyoto Station. A 70 cm case fits none of them. Every big station has a staffed luggage counter or a storage shop by the exits.
Left luggage at European stations. Paris Gare du Nord lockers charge €4 up to four hours and €9.50 for twenty-four. Rome Termini’s KiPoint takes €6 for the first five hours and €1 an hour after. Amsterdam Centraal has card-only lockers at €10 to €20 for 24 hours, and London St Pancras charges £10 for three hours and £15 for a day. Check the station’s own site for the rest. Madrid Atocha has nothing inside the station, but the shops around it do.
The apps. Bounce and Radical Storage put bags in shops and cafés for roughly €5 a bag a day; Bounce counts 24 hours from drop-off, Radical calendar days, so a bag left at 8 p.m. and collected at 10 a.m. counts twice. Book in the app, show the code, get a tag.
Hotel luggage rooms. Nearly every hotel holds bags free before check-in and after check-out, against a ticket. Apartments rarely do, so pair an apartment stay with one of the apps.
What never goes in. Passport, cash, medicine, keys, chargers and anything you could not bear to lose. Bounce excludes money, medicines, immigration documents and jewelry from its cover, and hotels and lockers cover nothing at all. Lock the case anyway. Everything you need for the next twelve hours lives in a bag that never leaves you: documents, medicine, a charger, a change of clothes on a forwarding day. Pack it before the suitcase, not after.
On the day. Add the storage stop to the start and end of a check-out day in Waystop so the walking times are honest, and photograph the locker number or the storage tag; the ticket is the first thing to go missing.