I’ll start with some of the bad advice I got before moving to Japan one June many Prime Ministers ago…

• One person told me not to bring any shorts or anything that would expose my legs because it’s not done in “that culture”.
• Another person told me to pack a black suit just in case I get invited to a funeral because “they have a lot of funerals over there”.
• Yet another person told me to pack enough snacks for the week because the fish goes bad fast.

After living in Japan through way too many sweaty summers, here’s my packing advice for a trip to Japan in the summer. If anybody has some questions or good suggestions, feel free to lay it out in the comments.

• T-shirts – both long and short-sleeved. You are going to sweat, and a lot of the temples and sights in Japan don’t give you a lot of room for shade. It is humid and you will sweat, a mid-day change of shirt will make your day. The night can sometimes be cool warranting a nice long-sleeved T-shirt.
• Ditto for socks. Unless you are wearing hiking sandals or something like that, you may want to change soggy ones for dry ones.
• Ditto for underwear.
• Short pants. It’s humid… that should be your first concern.
• An extra pair of shoes or something like that if you wear a larger size. You can probably get them in a larger city, but it also might be convenient to have something you can wear if you happen to lose a shoe in a rice paddy or somewhere like that.
• A hat to keep out the son. Hat’s are common, in fact you’ll see women speeding down the road ringing their bicycle bells wearing hats with oversized brims and what can best be describe as welder-mask looking visors on.
• Deoderant. If you wear it, bring it. It’s not as easy to find as long time residents wish.
• Presents. It’s always good to have something cool to give people you meet. It’s really hard to check what kinds of things are already available in Japan, but uniquely American candy, American magazines, or something unique from your home town always works. In Japan they really appreciate things that you can “only get” a certain place.

Things you don’t need:

• Umbrellas. It will rain, but they are so inexpensive there it might be better to get a cheap one than risk losing your good one on the train. In the Summer, it might even feel good to let yourself get wet.
• Diapers. This is my personal opinion, but I think diapers are much better in Japan. They are very soft, and pull-up types are abundant. This is one of the few items we actually bring with us when we travel from Japan to the U.S.
• A suit or dress clothes. Unless you know you are going to need them, I wouldn’t worry about bringing them. There are also cheap stores like Uniqlo where you can get some pretty good clothes inexpensively in a pinch.

I’m sure I’ve missed some things and I’ll add to this list in the comments if I realize what it is. As I said before, I’m open to comments and suggestions!

More Korean budget airlines are offering service to Japan’s airports, including Kansai International (KIX). This could mean cheaper airfares to and from Japan if you are willing to go through Korea. The airport in Seoul is really nice so that should not be a big problem if you are willing to have a long layover.

• Air Busan will be flying between Busan and Fukuoka starting in March. Air Busan is affiliated with Asiana which flies internationally out of Korea so this could be a great way to get Asiana flights out of Korea more cheaply.
• Jeju Air has been flying between Seoul Incheon Airport and Kansai International Airport or Kita-Kyushu Airport, and recently added new flights between KIX and Seoul Gimpo Airport.
• Jin Air which flies between Korea and Thailand is looking to add flights to Japan which means it could be cheaper to get from Japan to Thailand, or to fly through Thailand on the way back to you own country.

The trick though is that if you are buying airline tickets in Japan, you often have to specifically ask for prices from carriers that are not the main Japanese or American carriers. Often when you buy tickets and mention that you don’t mind Korean, Singaporean, Chinese, or European carriers your agent will say, “Oh, I see,” and start searching those as well.

Some of the cheapest fares to the United States I’ve seen have been on Air China. We’ll have to see if the new budget airlines flying to Japan will lead to better ways to transfer through other countries in Asia and get to further destinations more inexpensively.

This could also be a useful way to get from Japan to a country that has less expensive fuel surcharges. Fuel surcharges in Japan can get out of hand depending on the time of year so this could be a good way to fly over to a nearby country with lower fuel surcharges in order to buy the tickets for the longer leg of your flight.

If you are outside of Japan and flying in, it may be worth it to look into flying to Korea or Singapore first for a few days (not a bad idea) and then heading into Japan. It may be cheaper, it may be more expensive, but if you can hit an extra country or two without incurring much more financial damage, it may be worth it!

I’m not sure if you can find better deal, but this one sounds like a good, no hassle, cheap way to take a trip to Japan.

I originally saw this on a blog called Ryoko Japan.

Here is a link to the deal offered through JTB.

I think you can find a way to get to Tokyo cheaper, but if you just want to lay down $1000 and have your 4 nights, 1/2 day Tokyo tour, fuel surcharge, and airfare set, this could be a good deal. I believe this deal flies out of Newark Airport so it’s good for people on the East Coast of the U.S. (West Coast people can probably find even better deals because of the proximity.)

If you are in Japan, and one of your ulterior motives is to take pictures of the scenery and hopefully capture some uniquely Japanese moments, Coming of Age Day is a great day to be in Japan.

Coming of Age Day, called Seijin no Hi in Japanese, is the day that newly turned twenty-year olds are officially welcomed into adulthood. Kids dress up, usually in winter kimonos or suits, although there are no rules about clothing. The day usually starts at the local ward office, city hall, or other gathering place where the mayor or another town official welcomes the new adults into society.

There have famously been some incidences of violence or other vandalism, as well as twenty year olds, finally legally allowed to drink, showing up at the events drunk and making a ruckus. For the most part however, it’s a fun time for all the new adults who take the opportunity to meet up with old friends, have reunions, and go out club and bar hopping in the evening.

For photographers it can be a great day to get shots of young Japanese men and women dressed in traditional Japanese clothing. It’s important to note that it’s illegal to take photos of people without their permission, so it’s best to ask. On Coming of Age day, however, most of the girls have had their hair and nails professionally done, and are wearing their best clothing so in most cases they will be more than happy to pose for you. A lot of the young men may be a little drunk or busy trying to get attention from the young women around them, but I’m sure many would agree to being photographed in their finery.

My only warning to photographers would be not to seem too creepy. There will be security on duty in most of the gathering places in the morning, and there are often stories in the news of older men with super telephoto lenses accused of being a public nuisance and invading the privacy of some of the new adults.

The holiday falls on the second Monday in January every year. Coming of Age Day in 2010 falls on Monday, January 11th. It is a national holiday so expect crowds, but also expect the night spots to be lively, and traditional Japanese clothing or other formal clothing to abound. It’s also one of the few days you’ll see so many people walking around in geta, or the traditional wooden raised sandals worn for centuries in Japan.

In a recent interview, the owner of Coco Ichibanya Curry was asked about the success of his shop in light of the closing of all Wendy’s franchises in Japan.

First I’ll introduce Coco Ichibanya to those of you who are unfamiliar, or who live in Japan but have never ventured inside. Some of them look something like a dive from the outside, but they are one of the most family-friendly restaurants in Japan (going so far as to provide little child seats to put on the toilets, crayons for the kids to use during the short wait for the food to arrive, and the options of little toys or snacks as a dessert after dinner).

They always have an English language menu ready, but the Japanese menu has plenty of pictures as well. A pitcher of water is placed on the table so you never have to wait to quench your thirst.

If you are in Japan with an empty stomach and looking to get that stomach filled with some hot and relatively spicy goodness, Coco Ichibanya is a great place to go.

It’s Japanese curry, which means that if you are a fan of Indian food, you may like it, but you also may not. Most of the toppings are deep-fried, although the menu is quite extensive and includes a wide enough variety for almost any group of people… provided, of course, everyone likes curry and rice.

You can also order your curry however you like it choosing the amount of rice, the specific mix of toppings you want, the level of spiciness of the sauce, and although it doesn’t say it explicitly on the menu, you can ask for extra curry sauce (especially useful for people who prefer extra rice and just want to increase the overall volume of their order).

As to the secret behind the success, founder Tokuji Munetsugu (pictured) has some advice.

He tells restaurant owners not to worry about the competition, but to look at your restaurant through your own eyes, look at your customers, and make sure your shop lives up to your own standards. He claims not to be concerned about shops offering 300 yen bentos, but to make sure he keeps connected with what his customers want.

Munetsugu explains that they are not necessarily inexpensive, nor are they trying to create some kind of unique product. They keep the plates heated, and rather than dump curry from a big overheated pot, the keep their curry warm and then heat it up in a small individual pot for each customer that comes in. He likens this to a Japanese cafe keeping customer’s cups warm and then making them a cup of coffee on the spot instead of refilling it from a big pot of coffee which stays heated and gradually loses its flavor while sitting on a warmer.

He also wants to make sure that even customers that order the pork cutlet or other toppings that take time don’t feel forgotten in the lunchtime rush by announcing out loud that you are making “the cutlet for the guest at the counter”, or making sure to serve customers in the order in which they placed their orders. If an order is taking a little time, he would ask out loud about how a customer’s order is coming. Hearing that makes customers feel that they are important and that they haven’t been forgotten.

In a nutshell he says that the key to success are to listen to your customers and put them first, don’t worry about the competition, and just keep your shop up to your own high standards. If a customer has a problem or complaint, most of them will respond to you if you reach out, show concern, and try to make things right.

The last thing he says is that if you want a successful business, you don’t need friends and hobbies. His final word of advice for young businessmen and people that want to be successful is to wake up early and clean your workspace every morning, and to never be late or take a day off. In fact, to work even harder on the days you feel tired or sick.

Yet again I had to buy airline tickets to travel internationally starting and ending in Japan. Faced with two main options, JTB and H.I.S., again, I gave both of them a chance for my business. I’ll tell my story here, then end with some advice I’d like to give people about buying airline tickets in Japan.

I first went to a local H.I.S. shop where I had bought tickets before. I asked about travel from japan to my city of choice, and gave a list of dates… well, actually I gave a range. Anytime from August 16th until the end of August. The woman behind the counter smiled curtly, and said, I’m sorry but this may take some time. She then proceeded to ask my preferred airline if any, and whether I minded non-Japanese, non-American carriers. I said that I didn’t and she quietly returned to her desk.

After some time she came back with two dates that were the cheapest with open seats. I thanked her and told her I’d get in touch the next day.

That evening I went to JTB. The woman behind the counter came over to help us. I gave her my range of dates and told her upfront that I didn’t mind which carrier. She thought for a moment, walked over to her computer terminal, sat down, hit a few buttons, then came back to me. She said that she wasn’t able to put in a range of dates and asked if I could specify one date.

I asked her to check the two dates for which H.I.S. had given me reasonable prices.

She came back with unreasonable prices of about US$2,800 per ticket.

The next day I returned to H.I.S. to hear that the tickets I’d originally wanted had been sold over the weekend. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind checking a later range of dates until she found a cheap ticket I could use. She asked me for my cell phone number so that I wouldn’t have to stand right there waiting while she checked.

She worked her way through my dates and finally found a good price (albeit with a hectic travel schedule), for a reasonable date. The process took about fifteen minutes, but she found new tickets in the same price range as the previous tickets.

I bought the tickets there, and paid for them all in cash (this is a good thing for people who don’t like debt, a tough thing for people who don’t want to drop thousands of dollars on one purchase all at once).

So here is my brief advice for dealing with H.I.S. an JTB:

• Don’t be shy about giving a range of dates. As the agent at JTB was quick to point out, they can’t search a range of dates for cheap available airline tickets, but as the HIS clerk demonstrated, if they want your business they can do the necessary legwork to satisfy their customers.
• State upfront that you do not necessarily need a Japanese or American airline for your trip. Sometimes China Airlines or other asian carriers are offering the best deals.
• Try to go to the shop in person, if possible, when business is slow, but not around lunchtime. It is nice to be the only customer at the counter because your agent can also easily ask the advice of other agents.
• Try different shops. You may get bad service at one JTB and good service at another. It often depends on the agent you get and how willing that agent is to work for your business.
• Ask about things such as the fuel surcharge. This will vary by carrier and could really affect the total price of your flight. (A quick note: fuel surcharges are zero for the months of August and September! No telling if this deal will extend into October or if the fuel surcharge will return with a vengeance.)
• Ask about your seats, meals, and anything else you might be concerned with. One of the benefits of using a travel agent is having someone who is accountable to help you figure things out.
• If you can, travel during the Japanese off-season. Ticket prices could be really cheap when planes are not full of families traveling during the summer vacation and obon, or during the winter.

UPDATE: Video replaced with more recent video of Misaki Omukai (including an interview)

Iwate Prefecture, Kuji City
Japanese online bulletin boards are alive after a Japanese Ama Diver (the women and very rarely men who dive for abalone (called “awabi” in Japanese) with virtually no equipment. It is one of the old traditional occupations in Japan. The tradition of women free-diving in the sea is said to have started over 2,000 years ago. Tourists can watch them work and eat seafood like sea urchin or oysters right out of the sea there and in other nearby parts of Japan.

My personal image of Ama Divers was of old ladies going into the ocean and diving for oysters for pearls or other high-priced shellfish. Movies tend to show incredibly beautiful and sensual Japanese women lithely diving into the depths and bringing up some succulent oyster. If anyone here has seen the amazing 1985 Juzo Itami film, Tampopo, you saw the scene in which a young girl pulls an oyster out of the ocean and sells it to a mysterious man in a white suit…

I’ll just embed it from youtube rather than give you my inept description.

This particular beautiful Japanese Ama Diver is not the one I’m writing about though. Recently on some interviews of new divers at an Ama Diver festival, 19 year old Misaki Omukai raised eyebrows when featured on a short NHK documentary.

Here she is in a video below, and maybe you can see why she is one of the hot topics on the Japanese bulletin boards right now.

She is still too young and inexperienced to be on her own in the ocean, and the commentator on the video mentions that despite spending her whole life swimming around in the ocean in this area, it is still dangerous for her. You can see her taking some huge sea urchins and preparing some fresh “uni” for the some tourists.

At the end of the interview she does mention wanting more tourists to come to the area, so for full disclosure, I want to say that I have some doubts that this girl will ever be a real Japanese traditional Ama Diver, and there is a good chance she is a part of the town’s campaign to get more tourists.

I also think it will work considering how many people in Japan are commenting about how much they would pay for the chance to have some seafood served by Ms. Misaki Omukai of Kuji City in Iwate Prefecture.

This is an update to a previous post about using credit cards and atm cards in Japan.

I have recently gone around Japan with some friends, and although most places I go take credit cards (Visa and Mastercard are the most widely accepted), I have recently been to a few family restaurant chains, and less expensive kaiten (revolving) sushi places that only accepted cash.

Please ask or call a shop beforehand to be sure, but I want to advise you to have at least some cash with you when you go out because there still are a lot of places that are not accepting credit cards. I also believe many shops that previously accepted credit cards are beginning to go cash-only to cut costs.

The extent to which cash is king in Japan can be seen through the travel agencies. I mentioned the travel agency HIS in a previous post, but failed to mention that while this is the national chain I prefer, and has more often than not given me the best prices, the HIS travel agency in Japan is a cash only business.

To put that in perspective, once I had to pay for tickets to Hawaii for a trip with my family and my extended family for a total of 8 people… the day I went to pick up the tickets, I was carrying more than a million yen with me, or more than ten thousand dollars in my wallet.

Although I want everyone to be able to have an inexpensive travel Japan experience, I also don’t want people to have to keep adjusting plans or making it hard for people by trying to pay for everything with credit cards. At the end of the day, the price is the price, and in the case of Japan, it might be a good idea just to go cash and avoid some of the international usage fees and other incidental trouble (like having to find a restaurant that takes your plastic).

At the end of the day, it might be best and cheapest just to go cash in Japan as much as possible. (As I mentioned in the post linked to above, you can access US bank accounts through ATMs at 7-11 convenience stores, and Japanese post offices as well, neither of which should be very hard to find.)

People all over the world know about McDonalds, and I wrote about Mos Burger in Japan here. Another fast food option I’d like to introduce to everyone is called Lotteria. This one is a straight up burger shop that has a menu similar to McDonalds, unlike Mos Burger which goes out of its way to offer a Japanese twist on the fast food burger idea.

My personal favorite burger is called the Zetsumyou Burger (pictured to the right). The meat is meaty and good, and it’s topped with lots of good lettuce, tomato, and onion. Everytime I’ve had it, the lettuce has been fresh and crunchy, which really made it tasty.

Some of the other burgers they offer are the Zeppin Burger, and the Straight Burger, including some with double patties. The difference is in the toppings.

In the zetsumyo burger picture, you can see the 360 yen price for the burger by itself, and the 660 yen price (reduced from 690 yen) for the medium sized potato set.

However, the best thing about Lotteria, although not cheap by fast food standards, is that if you add 30 yen to the set menu price, you can trade up from french fries to a whole potato baked at high temperatures, and served with the option of salt (no extra charge), butter (30 yen), *mentaiko cream sauce (40 yen), or caramel sauce (40 yen).

I always order the potato as it feels like a healthy alternative to french fries, and is quite delicious. Don’t be afraid to try the caramel sauce or the mentaiko if you are in Japan. Mentaiko is a little salty, a little fishy so fans of other types of caviar and roe may enjoy it.

Here’s the link to Lotteria’s menu, and if you are in Japan, you can often find Lotteria shops in mall food courts, train stations, parking areas, and sometimes out on the street. The menu is in Japanese, but maybe you can get an idea from this. You can click on the upper left links to see burgers, side menus, the morning menu, and kids meals, as well as their “umayasui menu” which is Lotteria’s answer to other fast food shops’ low price options.

Here’s the commercial for the zetsumyo burger I mentioned above!

Looks good, doesn’t it?

*The mentaiko cream sauce is the roe of the pollock fish, and often served in Japan as a pasta sauce, or even spread on bread. There is also a spicy version.

If you have always wanted to see Mount Fuji but never had the chance you can always try watching through this webcam. I have heard there are a few webcams to use to get your Mount Fuji fix, but this is far and away the best one.

Here is the webcam that will show Mount Fuji any time of day…

Also if you look over to the left, you can choose “best shot” and see some of the clearer or more interesting shots of Mount Fuji from the past, before getting back to the live camera and just watching the one of the most famous mountains in the world real time.

You can also use the map placed below the webcam image to change the camera angle and you have three different angles to choose from.

They don’t have an embed option so I can’t put it up here for you but here’s the site of the Mount Fuji web cam. The picture at the top of this post was taken from the webcam at Fujinomiya on January 15, 2008. This is one of my favorite ones on the site because of how it looks almost like it is erupting… lest we forget that the majestic Mt Fuji is still just a big volcano!