Jeffalopolis.com

I know there are a plethora of travel guides and different blogs telling you what you need to know about and see when you goto Japan for the first time; these are some of the things I learned pretty quickly when I got there.  Having watched a lot of anime and j-drama, I figured I was pretty ready for the real thing; people running to school with toast hanging out of their mouth, etc.  The thing none of the shows touch on is how to get by day to day.

1. Sumimasen is a word you will use CONSTANTLY; get used to saying it.  If you want to get someone’s attention, or try asking about something, that’s the word you’ll use.
2. CASH!  Living in America you get pretty used to paying for everything with a swipe of a plastic card here and there.  In Japan, some places will take your credit card, but when you hand it to them, they give you a funny look.  I had a problem trying to buy something at Bic Camera with a card and he needed some extra information, but I had no idea what he was asking for.  Having read a few things before going, we knew we would need a fair amount of cash, so we took a lot with us, had a little bit exchanged at the airport in Japan, then went to the post office to have the rest exchanged.  That was quite a hassle with everyone there doing their normal banking stuff.  What we ended up doing that worked fantastically was to use the ATM in the lobby of the post office to get more cash from our accounts.  I had USAA which didn’t charge any foreign transaction fees, but one of my traveling companions uses Bank of America which charged hellacious fees.  So do some research and call your bank before you go to see about what foreign transaction fees they might have.  If you do insist on trying to use credit cards, the foreign transaction fees exist there too (usually 3% of your purchase.)
3. Don’t tip!  One of my employees is Japanese and that was the first thing that she told us to watch out for.  After googling it, I saw it explained pretty well as “you don’t have to bribe the Japanese into giving you good service.”  Not only is a tip not required, it might even be considered offensive.
4. Picture menus are your friend; we ate a lot of the family style dining places like you see in anime all the time.  Good food, pretty cheap, and they’re all over the place.  Even Denny’s in Japan is a good place to eat; 7-11 provided us with a lot of good meals as well, which was shocking since here all they have is the scary hotdogs that have been sitting on the rollers for five years.  We also ate at Sukiya (beef bowl place) a lot; which is yet another really good, cheap place to eat.  The only time we ate somewhere that didn’t have a picture menu was when we went hunting for an okinomiyake place.  Luckily, you already know what the thing you want to eat is, and then you just have to pick which meat you want.  Being good at charades is also helpful (see below.)
5. Be good at playing charades; you’ll randomly run across people that can speak a little bit of English and you can probably speak a little bit of Japanese if you watch a lot of anime, etc, but you will run across a time when you’re trying to buy something, trying to get directions, when you just can’t communicate at all.  We got by pretty well with using charades to express what we wanted; say you want beef okonomiyake and don’t know the word for beef, you can just moo.  Sure you’ll feel like an idiot mooing at your waitress, but you get the point across, and you’ll get your beef.
6. Make VERY sure that your hotel has wireless, as you will need to use is constantly.  Before you head out site-seeing, you’ll want to research how to get there.  You can usually run across English directions on a blog, or tourism site about which subway/JR station you need to get off at.  If you have a printer handy, it doesn’t hurt to print off the directions and the Kanji name of the station in case you need to ask someone for directions.
7. Don’t be afraid to get lost; just remember to always keep in mind how to get back to the station, but most areas of Japan are perfectly safe to wander around in and you can usually stumble across something really cool.  While we were lost looking for a shrine, we ran across two other ones that were really beautiful and we never would have gone to see them had we not been lost.
8. Pack a suitcase for your clothes, then put that inside a larger empty suitcase and use that for your souvenirs; you’ll end up buying a lot more than you think you might (plus figure boxes are large.)
9. A lot of supermarkets have 100 yen stores within them where you can pick up lots of cheap souvenirs that are still pretty nice.  We also spent an obscene amount of money at Oriental Bazaar in Harajuku (http://www.tokyo-bazaar.com/harajuku/harajuku-oriental.html) which has most of the things you will find at other tourist sites (like at Tokyo Tower, etc) but they’re much cheaper at the Bazaar, and that way you won’t lug souvenir bags around with you while you’re sightseeing.
10. The scary looking people aren’t; there were a couple of times when you’d see large clusters of teenage boys sitting around at night, but unlike large cities in America where that is usually a recipe for trouble, they were all just playing PSP games.  Even the guys who looked like the typical anime biker gang tough-guy were perfectly polite.
11. Summer is disgustingly hot and humid; if you’re planning a trip, don’t do it for June (rainy season) or July (all that rain turns into humidity in the air and if you’re in Tokyo there’s no wind coming through all those skyscrapers.)  Tokyo is also big on ECO which is their expression for environmental save the Earth stuff; what this translates to is that stores don’t have their AC on very high, if at all, and the fountains and other public places to cool down are shut off.  Most people wore several layers of clothes just to keep all the sweat from showing through.  It’s not so bad outside of the city because places still use AC and there are breezes, but prepared for pain if you’re in Tokyo during the summer.