• I studied about 1-2 hours a day on average.
• I broke it down into sections, and focused on a section each day.
• I studied the book Kana Pict-o-Graphix by Michael Rowley (Preview the book here)
• I also printed out worksheets from Benri Nihongo and practiced writing every day (Download practice sheet here).
• I read the Pict-o-Graphix book before falling asleep each night.

And there you have it! I basically used two tools. Then I started reading everything I saw in Japan even though I didn’t know what it meant. It’s good practice. As a side note, I did only 10 hiragana from the red “Let’s learn Hiragana” book.

When you study katakana, I think the hardest is　シ “shi” vs　ツ”tsu” and ソ”so” vs ン”n” so you’ll have to come up with the best way for you to remember these. Good luck!

Directly on a website like Weather.com the weather forecast seem accurate, but I want to see weather on my Google homepage without having to click around. I think the main issue is there’s not enough information about the day displayed. For example, here’s today’s Google widget. It shows today as partly cloudy and tomorrow as a rainy day, but it’s probably going to rain between 11pm-3am.

Last week I found a Japanese widget in English that shows weather from Yahoo Japan. So far it’s been awesome! It shows the weather changes through out the day for today and tomorrow and then gives an extended forecast. Here’s a screen shot so you can compare it to the Google widget weather. I like the 3-hour window of information.

It has a lot of locations and options to choose from and can display Celcius or Farenheit. It also reads the language you’re using for Google and automatically choose English or Japanese for you. If you use Google as your homepage, I recommend this widget. You can find it by searching “pinpoint weather japan” or by visiting this site for more info.

1. Debit Card and $100 - Many people say bring cash because many places don’t accept credit cards. This is only kind of true. I say bring $100 and your debit card instead. At the airport you can minimize  exchange rate fees by changing only $100 into Yen. This way you’ll have cash on hand and can buy some things from the vending machines and pay for transportation when you arrive. Major stores will take a debit card if it has the Visa or Mastercard logo on it. To get money, you can withdrawal using your Visa or Mastercard from almost any Japan Post Office (no ATM fee) or 7-11 (~250 Yen ATM fee). Very fair exchange rates are set each day by Visa or MasterCard, and depending where you bank you’ll be charged 1% from Visa or Mastercard, and 1% or more from your bank. And you’ll have a withdrawal limit of $500 USD per day most likely. And many major stores will accept credit cards as payment.
2. Deodorant - It gets hot and humid during the summer, and sometimes public transportation cranks up the heat in the winter. To stay dry, you should bring some antiperspirant/deodorant. I haven’t seen it for sale that frequently in Japan. When I did buy it in Japan I had to go to a few pharmacies until I found a Ban Rollon for about 500 Yen. It’s small and lasts maybe 3-4 weeks. Costco sells Speed Stick deodorant (non antiperspirant) but I don’t think it works very well.
3. Hand Sanitizer - I haven’t seen this for sale in Japan. You’ll be touching a lot of things including doorways, bus or subway handles, money, and then it’ll be time to eat! Sometimes it’s hard to find places to wash your hands. Many bathrooms are missing two things… soap and paper towels. When you go to a restaurant they’ll usually give you a wet towel, but I think bringing a small bottle of hand sanitizer will help you stay healthy and give you a piece of mind.
4. Handkerchief - There’s usually no towel or air dryer in the public bathrooms, and you might need it to wipe sweat from your face in the summer. Something cheap is fine. When you’re in Japan you can hit the shops and find a nice one for 500 yen or a Burberry or Calvin Klein for 1000 yen or less.
5. Digital Camera - Sure, Japan is known for electronics and gadgets, but they’re not cheap. I find that many things in Japan cost the same or more than in the US. And all Sony products have only Japanese language menus. When you’re capturing memories, it’s better safe than sorry.
6. 3 Prong Outlet Adapter – Almost all outlets are 2 prong only. So if you have any 3 prong electronics like your laptop, bring an adapter. You could buy one here, but you’re exploring Japan so why waste time looking for one?
7. Over the counter allergy meds - Seasonal allergies? Allergic to dust, or anything else? You should bring some Clariton or Zyrtec. It’s not sold OTC here, and the OTC meds are expensive and cause drowsiness.
8. Aspirin - You should bring a small bottle of aspirin or Tylenol. It costs maybe $1-2 in the US for a travel size. If you need to buy it in Japan it’ll cost you around 700 Yen for 20 aspirin pills. If you need to buy some here, look for “Bufferin” or ask for it by the brand name.
9. Earplugs and Facemask - I recommend this because walls are thin in most buildings, so it might be hard to sleep at times.

How much does it cost?

$60 a year is what I pay ($5/mo!) for “Unlimited Country“. You can also choose to pay monthly for $5.95.

Photo courtesy of {link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/theshadowknows/2995004692/}lamont_cranston{/link}

What do I get for $60 a year?

• 1 US phone number (add additional numbers for a fee, great for separating personal life and business)
• Unlimited calls to USA and Canada landlines and mobiles
• Voicemail – works even if I’m offline
• Send SMS – but I can’t receive them
• Call Forwarding – I can forward calls to my mobile or other phone for a small fee
• Caller ID – I can control what displays on other people’s phones when I call them
• Skype to Go – This is great! I get 1 land-line number in Japan that I can call. This number connects to 1 contact which can be changed weekly. Great for doing business on the go, using it as an emergency number, or calling anybody. I use it to call my brother in American when I’m traveling.
• Free Skype to Skype – This is basically calling and chatting with another PC user.

I use my notebook PC, headphones I already own, and a microphone I bought for 1000 yen at Bic Camera.

And now, the story of how I discovered Skype…

When I first moved to Japan it was a huge deal because I was going to be doing business in America while living abroad, so I brought my Vonage router and phone with me on the plane to keep in touch with clients, friends, and family. It was pretty bulky, and I’d rate the sound quality a 6/10. It was great for a while because I had a working US phone number in Japan with unlimited calling which seemed insanely cool, but it came a price… roughly $40 a month. Then one day something terrible happened, my Vonage router stopped working! I freaked out and needed to find a fast solution. I remember my wife used Skype for free Skype-to-Skype chatting from the US to Japan, and I saw how cheap the phone service was. For the cost of 6 weeks of Vonage, I could have an entire year of Skype? It seemed to good to be true, but I need a phone fast so I signed up. Then I logged into Vonage and redirect the phone numbers to my new Skype number.

I’ve been using Skype for about 9 months now. I’d rate the Skype sound quality a 9/10. I experience poor sound only when I’ve been using my notebook a lot and things are running slow. A quick reboot fixes the problem. It’s great that I can use it almost anywhere as long as I have an Internet connection. And now they’ve released an iPod Touch / iPhone application so I can use Skype on my iPod Touch anywhere I can get a wifi connection such as my home, or even Seattle’s Best Coffee in Tenjin. It’s not available for the 3G wireless network, but if it was I’d get a  free iPhone in Japan for sure.

For a cheap monthly or yearly fee you can call unlimited to the U.S or Canada from Japan, even to Korea from Japan, or your originating country if it’s listed on the Skype website. International calls are pretty affordable too. Skype gets my vote for one of the best tools to make your life abroad easier.

Free iPhone in Japan

White Plan : 980 Yen
You can call anybody on the Softbank network for free between 1AM and 9PM. If it’s after 9PM, or if you’re calling a non-Softbank phone, the cost is 21 every 30 seconds. (I currently have this.)

White Plan Family Discount : Free
This is an add on of the white plan. You can call family members for free if they have a White Plan and are under your account. (I currently have this, it comes in handy and it’s free.)

S! Basic : 315 Yen
This is like an Internet connection fee. You have to have it if you want to 1) Use the Internet and 2) Want to have an e-mail address for sending MMS/Text. It’s important because you can’t send a normal SMS to non-Softbank users. (I have this too.)

Packet Flat-rate Full : 1029-4410 Yen
I spoke to a guy at Softbank and he said you can use unlimited Internet for up to 4410 a month. If you use less than 4410 Yen a month, you’re charged less. But if you have an iPhone, I bet you’ll be using the packet plan a lot.

Handset Cost : 1280-1760 Yen
This is a monthly fee for 24 months. The 8GB is 1280, the 16GB iPhone is 1760 a month. “But Steve, you said FREE!?” Well, they don’t want you to run off with the iPhone, so to make the iPhone free Softbank applies a discount.

Monthly Discount : 1280 Yen
This is for 24 months. You are actually paying full price for the phone, but this discount cancels out that price, making it free. It brings the 8GB 1280 Yen cost to 0, and it makes the 16GB only 480 Yen per month.

Tricky monthly phone charge and discount.
It’s tricky because even though it’s a 2 year contact, they don’t start billing you for the physical phone until the 3rd month. This makes it 26 months total until you’re done paying off the phone.

The final price estimate
8GB : 2324 – 5705+ Yen per month
16GB : 2804 – 6185+ Yen per month

In the end it costs more than the price estimate because you’ll probably call more than just Softbank users, but this gives you an idea of the price. If you cancel, you are charged a cancel fee of 9975 Yen and you must pay for the remainder of the phone. So if you get the free 8GB iPhone and you cancel on month 12, you owe for the remaining 12 months + 2 months (because they didn’t charge you the first 2 months). So you owe 1280 x 14, or 17920 Yen in addition to the 9975 cancel fee. OUCH!

I thought about getting the iPhone, but I already have a phone which I’d have to pay the remaining 9 months on. Lame. I already have a 16GB iPod Touch. It’s nice, and with all of the Apps available I’ve completely replaced my Palm PDA. I think I’ll just stick with the iPod Touch for now.

For anybody curious, here are some Softbank iPhone commercials.

1) Negative Foreigners Online

Allie nailed it on the head in this comment: “A lot of other foreigner-in-Japan sites seem to be based on cynical observations of what sucks about living here…”

I was interested in seeing what life is like for others living in Japan and I wanted to compare their experiences to mine. Although there are a handful of great “foreigner in Japan” blogs out there, I found a lot of people talking as if Japan sucks, the world is against them, and there’s nothing they can do about it besides complain and have a pity party. I saw that a lot of things happening to me have happened to them as well, but they had quite a different and negative spin on the matter. Negativity can easily spread and can get harder to combat when it’s around you. So I’d stop reading certain sites and go searching for others because I still wanted to read and learn more, but the new sites usually ended up being negative too. I got some negative comments on my blog, some bad emails here and there, and a few bad comments posted on other sites. Sure, I’m a big boy and can take criticism, but this and the other events I’ll talk about all added up.

The result: I started to become negative, and I started to see it reflect in my posts or drafts of posts, and in my real life. I also started to write in a less personal and more generic way.

My solution: I kind of “unplugged.” I started posting about food, lots of food. I can’t really say many bad things about food, especially the delicious and wonderful food my wife made. Before I stopped posting, I stopped reading news about Japan. I stopped reading Japan blogs all together. From time to time I’d check out a few in my blogroll/links section on this site. Instead of blogging I started working more to take my mind off of things.

2) Douchebags in Japan

First I want to lay this out there. Do you live here, and am I talking about you? Well if we have hung a few times, the answer is no. Now back to the topic. That’s right, I’m talking about the ’strange in a wrong way’ unpleasant foreigners living in Japan. If you’ve met a few foreigners then you might know what I’m talking about. When I first moved to Japan I only hung out with Japanese people… who spoke 90% Japanese. It was a challenge because my lack of Japanese didn’t help keep things flowing. I was starving for some good English conversation, dinner with friends, drinks, some adventure, some fun, so I started socializing with other foreigners who I met at parties, or the gym, at the bar, or randomly here and there. I thought they were all pretty much not awesome. The not awesome people included a lot of socially awkward people, a lot of negative people hating their life or where they live, some people jealous of me or my career or my awesome wife, a few people that were quick to judge others, and some old timers that were dicks. So I backed off from meeting new people for a while. The bad thing about this is I’m sure I missed out on some good friendships along the way because I overlooked a few people. But I felt there was minimal return for the time and energy I was putting into socializing and being a nice guy. Even a simple hello on the street or a nod along the way was rarely returned. Talk about depressing! I’ve been doing sales and marketing for as long as I can remember, I am good with new faces in the U.S., I am good with Japanese people, but not the native English speakers in Japan?

The result: I felt like I was getting kicked down every time I tried to stand up. So the more new people I met, the more reluctant I was to stay positive and open minded. I got sucked further into the negativity hole without realizing it. I was confused at times because I felt like there was some problem with me but I didn’t know what it was. I felt like an outsider. To add fuel to the fire, I started to think I was relating more with the negative blogs I read (which I wasn’t).  And I didn’t get it… until now.

My solution: Not all people I met were unpleasant. I think that I took my first few months of negative encounters the wrong way and too personal. Let’s face it. Life is full of douchebags, so I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge and I should have read the atmosphere better so I could adjust quicker to my surroundings. And that’s what I’ve done. In the last 6 months I’ve strengthened my current friendships, I’ve met a lot of new good people, I’ve made some great friends, and I’ve been pretty active in Japan and traveled abroad a few times. I’ve even had some successful get-togethers at my new townhouse.

3) Busy Working

I tried to work more and more to get my mind off of things. Apartments can be pretty small here in Japan so my office was my laptop in the living room area. Since my work is always in my face, I seemed to work on and off throughout the entire time I was awake. I started to feel overwhelmed so I stopped posting quality on this site until it came to a stop. The point was to work hard, work long, and keep my mind busy. I thought I was multitasking my work but instead I was just distracting myself when I was at home, doing things in 12-16 hours I could have done in 4. When I wasn’t working I was spending that time with my wife and few friends. On I side note, I thought working from just my laptop would be totally sweet. And even though it is sweet, sometimes I get pretty caught up and need to make phone calls to the US and take care of some business. I realize that I prefer a desk or station area when I’m living somewhere, and a laptop when I’m traveling.

The result: I was stressed out because home and work lives were too easily mixed.

My solution: I started to hang out with friends more often. And even though I stopped blogging, I started an offline journal because writing relieves my stress. I find that kind of funny now because it’s like I never stopped writing about things in Japan, I just moved it to a personal level without noticing until now. I also started studying Japanese vocabulary before going to sleep. This helped me get my mind off of work and other things.

4) The Apartment Downtown – Not Enough Sleep

When I moved to Fukuoka, I lived right in the middle of the action in Daimyo. It was great at first. According to Yahoo Maps (I think it was Yahoo), in a 15 minute radius of walking I had almost 500 ramen shops (or maybe shops that also sell ramen?), over 1500 izakayas, and countless other restaurants and shops. For the first 3-4 months I rarely ventured out of a 9 block section of town because everything was there. That’s kind of cool. But it was the loudest place I’ve ever lived. From what I’ve seen, most apartment walls are pretty thin in Japan unless the building is a 0-5 years old. Even then, you have to specify ‘quiet’ when apartment hunting to weed out the thinly built units.

Because I was in the middle of the action, a few problems came up. At night, most of the people walking around are there for a night on the town. A few times a month on my way back home from shopping or eating, I had to avoid puddles of puke. I even caught some guy peeing by the doorway of my apartment. The weekends and holidays are filled with drunken people and inappropriate salary men partying it up while taking advantage of the “all you can drink” dinner specials.

There were busy restaurants, karaoke, and bars in the front of my building. In the back, it was filled with the back of other apartments and the back of many restaurants. Many places would close around 6AM so the back of the apartments would echo with groups drunk people yelling, laughing, and singing and overly loud restaurant staff obnoxiously greeting everybody that entered or left. I like greetings like that, just not when it sounds like it’s in my bedroom. A few months after we moved in, loud construction started on a nearby building. When it was 75% finished, construction started on one directly behind my balcony.

The result: I rarely got a good stretch of sleep. The noise interrupted my business phone calls. It was loud from 8pm to 6am because of the restaurants, then loud from 9am until 5pm because of the construction. It sounded like people were yelling in my living room and jackhammers were in the bedroom.

My solution: We moved into a newly built townhouse away from downtown.

5) The Apartment – Too Small

I mentioned before that my last apartment was small. It was a 1LDK. From my understanding it means the number 1 is a bedroom, and then LDK means living area, dining area, and kitchen. The kitchen is a tiny area to cook, not it’s own room. So DK are usually together in one room. The size was about 6 tatami for the bedroom, a little bigger living room, a little smaller dining-kitchen area, and I think an above average bathroom. Entry ways were small sized. I’m 6′2″ (190cm) and the entry ways between each room were only 6 feet tall or less. Besides that, the apartment is an okay size if I just lived there with my wife, but I had nowhere to escape to because I often worked in every room on my laptop.

The result: I cracked my head once a twice a week for a year when I moved between rooms.My posture became worse because I wanted to avoid hitting my head. I really needed something to seperate my life from my work. I meantioned earlier that I like having a desk or work station where I live. A few reasons include the need to file  documents, have a printer and scanner, and the need for office supplies. With such a limited area to work and live, I had to be organized all the time and move business items around or put them some place when guests came over. That was a problem because closets are small and full of clothes so there was no place to put anything.

My solution: We moved into a bigger place. Our new place is western style with no sliding doors or tatami, and I have my own room as an office. Just like back in the US. It’s nice and now it’s easier to enjoy life when I’m not working.

6) No Internet

We moved near the beginning of November. When we moved I needed to switch Internet providers. This decision resulted with no Internet until February. There was some confusion with the order, new construction was needed, and then I overlooked a paper I had to send in. It wasn’t fun. Since I’m in a new townhouse that requires new construction to get Internet, nobody in the area had wireless that I could use.

The result: I spent 5-6 days a week at MediaCafe Popeye, an Internet cafe, and plugged my laptop into their Internet. It cost around 1,180 yen for 5 hours if I clock in before 8am. Drinks were free so I drank way too much coffee and Coca Cola. I spent time commuting, and maybe buying an iPhone would have been a good work around. Talk about stress! If there was a big issue that needed attention, I would have to run to an Internet cafe on the spot. A few times I had to take the 10 hour deal for 2360 yen.

My solution: I kept a strict time schedule to maximize my hours online at the Internet cafe. I also used some friends Internet from time to time and hopped on some free wifi at a coffee shop. Eventually things were sorted out and I got Internet installed at home.

Life is what you make it and should be enjoyed to the fullest. It’s important to focus on the positive aspects of life and learn from any misfortunes along the way.

I am back.

An animal and relations will become good.
Animals are alive with nature.
It is a friend wholly.

Add a “Booyah!” and you’ve got an awesome bag!

Update: Jyankee is right, it’s a shoe store! And I happened to find a small sized location.

Fresh sliced fish perfect for grilling

Egg stuffed fish... I stay away from this. I don't like the exploding eggs when you chew it.

Tiny fish, great for a yakitori style dinner. Slap it on a stick, grill it, eat it just like that.

Now let’s work on getting some Chicago style pizza cookin’ in the bakery Mr. Grocery Store! If they had a suggestion box I’d be dropping notes every day. Non-seafood-non-mayo pizza, big steak, some Diet Dr. Pepper please and thank you.

This bag can be yours for only 600 yen! Get it now at your local Daily Yamazaki!

Besides the last picture, the quality isn’t bad for a 2 megapixel camera phone.

I haven’t eaten any melons yet, but I think I’d save myself $20, I mean 2000 Yen, and take the melon on the left!

Here are a few sea snail videos from Youtube, bleh.

Some questions people have asked include… how did I learn Hiragana? How do you make friends, find a job, contact friends and family, get around without knowing Japanese, buy clothes that fit, money, food, health, taxes, bugs, boredom, and so on. By the way I will write up something about Hiragana soon.