Driving in Japan is really nothing like driving in America.

The first difference is that people drive on the left side and the driver’s seat is on the right. This carries over into everyday life for things like walk ways or stairs. Are you about to bump into someone coming from the opposite direction? Simply move to your left like a car and pass by. Americans do this subconsciously as well, but to the right, so that if a Japanese person and an American person are about to bump into one another, they will since they will both slide to the same side.

Next, traffic signals work on timers not underground sensors like in America. This is very frustrating since lights turn even when there are no cars waiting.

Another frustrating difference is that smaller intersections lack turn lanes. This means if a car is waiting to turn, all the cars behind it are stuck. The result being that you miss the green light you would have made easily if there had been a turn lane.

A more dangerous difference has to do with street widths. In America you have wide, wide streets with bike lanes gutters, curbs, and sidewalks. In the Japanese countryside or even suburbs, you often have narrow, narrow roads where a street hardly any wider than a car pretends to be a two-way road. To make matters worse, outside of cities, rather than a curb or sidewalk, you have a steep drop off on one side where you can slide down into a rice field, while the other side is a right-angle drop off into a gutter a few feet deep.

Japanese cars are built with retractable side mirrors. Why? Because driving in Japan is often a game of inches. When two cars meet on one of the two lane roads that are really only one lane wide, they squeeze into someone’s driveway or vegetable field and retract their mirrors to get by. Many people retract their mirrors when they park as well since parking spaces can be quite narrow too.

And then there are the people over 80 years old who are seemingly unaware of the existence of motor vehicles and blithely cross the street wherever and whenever they damn well please, often while riding a bicycle only slight younger than they are. And please excuse them while they stop to pee alongside the road. We wouldn’t want to deprive them of that special au naturale response to nature’s calling.

Japanese often view their cars as mini-homes. They take off their shoes when getting into their car. They decorate them like a teenage girl’s bedroom. There are air fresheners, GPS/TV screens, and nap-friendly reclining seats for those workers who like to catch a few winks in a convenience store parking lot in the afternoons.

There a lot of people who don’t need or drive cars in Japan if they are close to public transportation like in cities, but for those who do, caution is advised.

Here are some pictures.

Drinking is a popular pastime in Japan. You can easily buy both hot and cold drinks from vending machines or the ubiquitous convenience stores. There are also a multitude of coffee shops, such as Starbucks or local Mom & Pop shops, and alcoholic “drink & light meal” places.

Coffee is a very popular public drink in Japan while tea is more often drunk at home, especially Japanese green tea. Many people prefer to drink their coffee iced in the hot and humid summer months. At home a variety of roasted barley teas, call “mugicha” are cheap and healthy. Of course, people drink juice and soda, too, though Coca-Cola is about the only one most Americans would recognize.

And then there is alcohol, which Japanese people consume in surprising quantities. In Japan you can drink alcohol from the age of 20. The traditional alcoholic drink is “sake” made from fermented rice. Beer, however, is the most popular drink with special beer gardens open during the summer.

For less serious drinkers, there is “chuuhai”, a kind of cocktail that is a mix of carbonated water, fruit juice and syrup. Non-alcoholic versions are also available.

Sumo is fairly famous as the unique national sport of Japan. It’s pretty straight-forward. Two men square off in a raised dirt ring about 15 feet across. From a crouch with both hands touching the ground, they lunge at each other. There are two ways to win; push the other wrestler out of the ring or throw him to the ground.

It’s something of a freak show with grotesquely fat men wearing tightly-wrapped huge belts and loincloths. But the ability to keep all that weight and power balanced while pushing and pulling on a weighty opponent requires a tremendous amount of skill and even grace.

There are six tournaments a year – 3 in Tokyo and 3 in different set locations around the country. Wrestlers are able to move up in ranks depending on their win-loss records. There’s a lot of pre-fight pomp and ceremony that can make watching a live tournament somewhat tedious, but there’s a digest version every night that recaps the matches.

It’s not limited to Japanese citizens although the number of foreigners allowed to compete is. Some Samoans and Mongolians have become grand champions. All the professionals are paid pretty well, making anywhere from $100,000 to $400,000 per year in base salary plus special bonuses for winning.

Although the sumo world is pretty strict, out in public they are usually gentle giants with a good sense of humor who will gladly pose with you for a picture if asked politely. It’s a minor thrill to see a pair walking in their kimonos and sandals thru a train station. They are rarely handsome since their bodies and faces are carrying all that extra weight, but they are a pretty cool part of traditional Japanese culture.

Well that's certainly a lot of very specific computer-related questions which I have absolutely no answer to. I'm not a gamer or anime-watcher or mange-reader, though most young Japanese people are.

A lot of it is related to two things: private dwellings and train commuting.

Young people typically live alone in small apartments where they can play their games and read comics or do whatever, but it's all very private. People don't invite other people into their private living place. If it's a home with a family, it's a little different since it's not private. Therefore, I have no idea about other people's computers or private habits.

Because a large percentage of the population commutes by train each day, they want something to do on the train. Traditionally that was reading comics or newspapers, but nowadays, it's playing games or looking at pictures or texting on their phone.

If you go to Wiki's homepage - http://www.wikipedia.org/ - you'll see it's in many languages.

Yahoo and it's affiliates seems to be the biggest internet provider in Japan.

There are a lot of American franchises successfully operating in Japan.

McDonald's, Baskin-Robbins and Starbuck's are the most successful. Starbuck and 31 flavors are pretty much the same in Japan as the USA; Mcdonald's has the same core items but additional Japanesey items as well, like teriyaki burgers and melon soda.

Subway and Kentucky Fried Chicken also have a lot of outlets in Japan.

But the one that surprises me the most is Denny's. Back in America, Denny's was kind of the cheapest family restaurant and in terms of service and food quality, you pretty much got what you paid for. But in Japan, it's still a family restaurant but a little nicer. The menu bears little resemblance to its American counter-part, though. Thankfully, it's much, much better.

Here's the restaurant and what I had for lunch. Looking forward to my next monthly visit!

The tanuki (狸 or たぬき in Japanese) is very similar to the maneki neko.

Tanuki, like most raccoons, have a mischievous but fun character. A lot of homes and traditional sake bars have statues of this animal character at the entrance.

Like foxes, they are often given supernatural shape-shifting abilities in folk legends.
In the Super Mario Bros video games Mario can wear a "Tanooki Suit" which gives him the ability to fly, spin his tail to attack enemies, and shape-shift into a statue.

Tanuki are popular as statues since they are reputed to bring several benefits such as good luck, protection, wisdom, strength, etc. They wear a big hat with a big belly and a big scrotum and carrying a sake bottle - not the most appealing appearance but the big smile makes them cute somehow.

Sometimes Japanese people will incorporate foreign “loan words” into their own language. When it’s a combination of two words, such as “personal computer” they will take the first syllable of each word and make a new combo words so that “personal computer” becomes “pasukon”, “engine stop” becomes “ensuto” and “costume play” becomes “cosupure” (pronounced “cah-sue-poo-lay).

People dressing up as their favorite fictional character is not unique to Japan. However, the devotion to anime and manga, along with just an enjoyment of dressing up, causes Japanese people to take cosplay (as the world now calls it) to heights probably not seen anywhere else in the world.

Cosplay can be done for conventions like the hardcore one held annually in my city (pics here), or for role-play parties, or even for couples looking for a little zing in their love hotel. In my opinion, there is a symbiotic influence between manga, anime, cosplay, and the appearance of game characters in many of the online role-playing combat games.

Our Spiral Knight characters are influenced by a form of chibi (small) manga with over-sized heads, or a top-heavy appearance.

Japan is not a actually a very religious country. Their beliefs concerning gods, the supernatural, and the afterlife are a muddled mish-mash of their national religion – Shintoism – and Buddhism and old wives tales (literally) and astrological superstitions and a few other local beliefs thrown into the religious stew pot. They don’t know why they do half the things they do or necessarily believe in any of it.

Part of their spiritual beliefs centers around ancestors, or what could be called ancestor worship. Many households have a butsudan (household altar), which is basically a very nice wooden box with gold decorations and shelves for candles, incense, pictures, and food all for the purpose of paying respects to and possible getting some help from (all very Mulan-like), ancestors.

From August 9th to August 16th is a very special time in Japan. Most companies give their employees a week off. Why? Because it’s the time of Obon (お盆) .

Obon is Buddhist-Confucian custom / family reunion holiday during which people return to ancestral family places and visit and clean their ancestors' graves. It’s also the time when the spirits of ancestors are supposed to revisit the household altars. There are also a lot of fun local festivals where people where their yukatas (light summer kimonos) and eat festival food and do a special circle line dance known as bon odori (odori=dance).

As I said in my post on o-Bon (above), everyone in Japan takes vacation at the same time.

So where do Japanese people like to go?

Often they go to some place that has made itself into a tourist spot, usually be creating an old town feeling with similarly rustic architecture featuring a few interesting and tasty food and drinks and sweets specialties. There are also a lot of shops with cute handmade jewelry or accessories.

Generally a couple or family or group of friends will travel 2-4 hours away, so you feel like you "went" somewhere, and just have a fun time together walking around and eating and drinking. You take some pics of your time together and return home with souvenir snacks of some kind.

We went to a town near the coast about 3 hours away. Here are some random pics from the trip.

Japan is one of the quaint countries with royalty. Japanese love their Emperor and the imperial family. So much so that the emperor’s birthday is a national holiday, and Japanese people use a calendar based upon the reign of the emperor.

Each emperor’s reign gets a name. Currently we are in Heisei, year 26. Before that was Showa, Taisho, and Meiji. It was in the Meiji era that Japan became a modern nation.

It was in the Showa era that Japan began to aggressively expand into other countries. Yes, Japan was the Bad Guy, as reluctant as they are to admit it. The Imperial line nearly ended after Japan’s defeat in WW2, but General MacArthur wisely decided to allow the Emperor to continue his symbolic leadership of the country. It’s always been the military, or now the government, where power lay. But the imperial family will continue for a quite awhile I think.

Many Japanese feel that it is their patriotic duty to climb Mt. Fuji at least once in their lifetime. Ideally the climb will be done overnight – it takes about 6 hours to ascend – so that one can view the sunrise from the summit. (Viewing sunrises from mountaintops is kind of a spiritual thing in Japan.)

Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan (3,776.24 m or 12,389 ft), but not so high that you can’t walk up it and back down within 12 hours. It depends on how far you drive up it first. It is located fairly close to the center of Japan and can be seen from quite far away. Its symmetrical cone-shape makes it a popular image for sightseeing and art.

Mt. Fuji looks much prettier from afar. Close up it has a rather barren surface. There’s really nothing very appealing about the climb. In fact, a well-known Japanese implies that it’s worth climbing once but only a fool would do it twice.