The grey machine by the convenience-store window, and how it prints your ticket

It is a little after eleven, the hostel printer is a myth, and the ferry you booked exists only as a PDF on your phone — a barcode the man at the gate in Takamatsu will want to scan, not squint at. Two doors down a 7-Eleven is open, as it was always going to be. Just inside the window, past the umbrellas and the hot case, a grey machine the size of a fridge is glowing, and it is the reason you will make the boat.

The machine by the window

Nearly every convenience store in Japan keeps a multicopy machine (maruchi kopī-ki, マルチコピー機) near the entrance, usually beside the magazine rack where the light is good. At 7-Eleven the units are built by Fujifilm; at Lawson, FamilyMart, and Ministop they are made by Sharp, which matters more than it sounds, because the two brands take your files by completely different routes. The touchscreen is tall, a little sticky, and defaults to Japanese, with an English button waiting in one of the top corners.

What it does goes well past copying. It scans to a USB stick or a memory card, prints photographs, sells tickets, sends a fax if you still need one, and — for residents — issues official certificates from a municipal database. For a traveller the headline function is plain printing: a boarding pass, a hotel voucher, a QR code that a rural bus driver has no way to read off a cracked screen. A single black-and-white A4 copy laid on the glass runs ¥10; printing a file you brought with you is a little more.

Printing from your phone

Here the two brands split, and knowing which one you are standing in front of saves you ten confused minutes. At 7-Eleven you upload first: the netprint app, or its browser version, takes your PDF or photo over mobile data, sits on it for a moment, and hands back an eight-digit reservation number (yoyaku bangō, 予約番号). You walk to any 7-Eleven in the country, tap the option to print with a number, type the eight digits, and the file surfaces. A4 in black and white is ¥20, in colour ¥60.

At Lawson and FamilyMart the transfer happens at the machine itself. You open PrintSmash, join the Wi-Fi the machine is broadcasting — its network name is printed right on the screen — and push the file across from your phone while standing there, no data connection required. A second app, Network Print, works the 7-Eleven way, uploading ahead against a login. The prices match: ¥20 a monochrome page, ¥60 in colour, with A3 and photo sizes costing more.

印刷したいものは、電波のあるうちにアップロードしておくと迷わない。

What else it will do

Feed it a photograph and it prints an L-size glossy (L-ban, L判) for roughly ¥30 to ¥40 — the size a passport-photo booth would charge triple for, and clean enough for a rail-pass application or a deposit form. It scans the other direction too, turning a paper reservation someone handed you at a ryokan into a PDF on your USB stick for about ¥30 a page.

Tickets are their own small world. At Lawson the concert, museum, and highway-bus tickets live not in the grey machine but in a separate red terminal beside it called Loppi (ロッピー); you make the booking on it, it spits out a slip, and you pay the slip at the register. 7-Eleven folds the same trade into its multicopy unit. When a special exhibition or a seasonal event slot sells only through these terminals — and some genuinely do — this is where a paper trip quietly becomes a real one.

Getting it right at the counter

Decide by the sign over the door. Standing in a 7-Eleven, install netprint and upload before you leave a strong signal; standing in a Lawson or FamilyMart, use PrintSmash and let the machine's own Wi-Fi do the work. Mixing them up is the classic stall — arriving at a 7-Eleven expecting to beam a file over local Wi-Fi, or turning up at a Lawson clutching a netprint number that means nothing to a Sharp machine. Payment is coins, ¥1,000 notes, and at 7-Eleven the nanaco IC card; there is no casual tap-to-pay for a single ¥20 page.

Go at an odd hour and you will have the thing to yourself. The one window to avoid is the weekday rush between eight and nine in the morning, when locals line up to print residence certificates before work, and again on the last day of the month. Print what you can the night before, while the store is quiet and the boat is still hours away.