Getting to Japan was easy enough.  I already had a passport, so it was as simple as buying a plane ticket and arriving on time at the airport.  There was no need to obtain visas, notify consulates, get immunizations—none of that.  The real trick was in getting to Japan cheaply.  It’s commonly thought in the US that Japan is a very expensive destination for tourists.  Even my Japanese wife preached that line to me.  The reality, I discovered, is a little more complex.  Indeed, Japan can be very expensive, and that’s probably what most western tourists experience.  But, if you know where to look, fantastic deals are easy to find.  In fact, excluding airfare, my two weeks traveling all over Japan were cheaper than two weeks in Dallas!  I’ll be sure to write more about this in future posts.

Of course, I have to give full deal-finding credit to my wonderful in-laws, who accompanied me on the trip.  Both seasoned international travelers and experts at stretching the (Canadian) dollar, their wisdom was solely responsible for making the trip the complete steal that it was.  Thanks, Kay and Aki!

The airfare was the single largest expense of the trip.  For tickets, my in-laws introduced me to IACE Travel.  IACE is a travel agency that caters to Japanese people living in the US, providing low-cost tickets to visit home.  They even answer the phone in Japanese.  Fortunately, they also speak English and will happily sell tickets to non-Japanese.  My round-trip ticket, all fees included, cost about $1000 from IACE.  That beat all the other agents and airlines I checked; some of those had prices almost three times as expensive.

Another key purchase was the Japan Rail Pass.  Japan’s public transit system is one the best in the world, allowing tourists convenient access to the entire country.  The JR Pass gives you unfettered access to the cross-country trains within a certain time span.  The cost is quite reasonable — a seven-day pass costs about the same as the regular fare from Tokyo to Hiroshima and back.  So, for anyone planning travel between cities, the JR Pass can be a very good deal.  Best of all, with a pass, you can choose to alter your travel plans at the last minute (or while on the train!) without having just wasted your ticket money.

Only foreigners (or Japanese nationals living elsewhere) can buy the JR Pass, and the process to get one is a bit convoluted.  First, you have to buy what’s called an “exchange order”.  These are only available outside Japan.  IACE sells them, so I purchased one when I bought the plane tickets.  Once you are in Japan, you’ll need to find a JR exchange office (located in certain stations) to convert your exchange order into a real JR pass.  After a bit of legwork, I was able to find the office in Shinjuku station and obtain my pass.

Another aspect of preparing for a Japan trip is coming to terms with smallness.  As I would come to discover, Japan is a culture of the small.  Whatever things you have, you can be sure there are smaller ones in Japan.  This pattern certainly holds when considering the provisions Japan makes for a tourist’s luggage.  While there are systems in place to shuttle a westerner’s bulky baggage between airport and lodgings, the traveler is soon required to adapt to an environment designed for Japanese concerns.  To enjoy one’s stay in Japan, it is absolutely necessary to travel lightly.  When boarding a train for another city, it’s best to take just a small- or medium-size backpack.  You don’t need anything more than a few days’ clothes and basic toiletries.  The ideal hotels have laundry machines and public computers, and other needs can be met by the surrounding environment.  With this in mind, I packed a small travel backpack into my luggage.

There was another reason for packing lightly: omiyage, or gifts.  The trip itinerary included many visits with members of my wife’s extended family.  Cultural rules required that I distribute omiyage to each of these people.  This was especially important for those relatives who had volunteered to let me sleep in their home.  My wife and I spent several weeks here in Oklahoma searching for fitting, individual gifts for more than twenty relatives.  The final luggage manifest was as follows: one large suitcase full of clothes and supplies, one large suitcase full of omiyage, and an additional roller bag full of — you guessed it — omiyage.  In other words, the gifts accounted for more than 60% of my luggage!

It’s worth mentioning that the electricity in Japan is a bit different.  I did the research at this page.  Here in the United States, a wall socket pushes around 120 volts.  In Japan, it’s 100 volts.  The western half of the country runs at a frequency 60 hertz (like the US), while eastern Japan uses a frequency of 50 hertz.  Japanese power sockets are the same as the US two- and three-prong sockets, though the two-prong sockets are more common.  Fortunately, the power difference was not a problem for me.  The few electric devices I did pack were all battery-powered with external chargers.  The chargers were clearly marked as to what types of electricity they would accept, and all accepted Japanese 100V at 50/60Hz.

My last bit of preparation was to devise a strategy to handle the thirteen-hour flights between Dallas and Tokyo.  I had never taken so long a flight, and I certainly was not looking forward to listening to jet engine noise for that amount of time.  After several days of research, I settled on a plan: noise cancellation, chill music, and drugs.  Interestingly, the best noise cancellation does not come from so-called “noise-canceling” headphones.  Rather, the most effective (and safest) option is an in-ear monitor, which is like an earplug with a tiny speaker inside.  I picked up a set of Etymotic ER4s, which are fantastic.  The chill music was just my ever-growing collection of ambient electronica.  For drugs, my doctor prescribed Ambien to convince my body to sleep.

That’s it for preparations.  While it was simple to get physically to Japan, a bit of forethought and preparation saved a ton of frustration and thousands of dollars.

In the next post on this subject, I’ll talk about arriving at Narita International and my first day in the country.

Unfortunately, some of these products are unavoidable. Most video drivers want to install two or three background tasks – one to apply the hardware settings, one to provide an overcomplicated control panel, and another to provide a cluttery system tray icon. Adobe Reader installs a service that is supposed to make it launch faster the two times per month you need to read a PDF. Visio insists on creating a My Shapes folder for the 1% of users who will create custom shapes. Someone should create a software user’s bill of rights to popularize the notion among developers that these behaviors are bad.

I develop software for a living, primarily for Microsoft platforms. Thus, Microsoft Visual Studio is unavoidable for me. VS is generally a good actor, but it has one annoying vice: it wants to create a folder in My Documents named Visual Studio 2005 (or 2008 if you’re hip). VS wants you to put your projects in this folder. Other things like settings and templates live here as well. Now I find this rather annoying, as I have an existing Projects folder elsewhere that contains my work. I don’t want VS settings or templates to go there. Plus, I find the name “Projects” more correct than “Visual Studio 2008″. One says “Here are the projects that I work on”, and the other says “Here is the stuff I do with Visual Studio”. So the VS default location is less than optimal for me.

Luckily, the Visual Studio folder is fairly easy to move. There are some settings in VS’s Options dialog that look like they do the trick, but they don’t do a complete job. To fully move the folder, you need to edit the registry. The process is the same in both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008, save for the folder name:

1. Launch Visual Studio for the first time. VS will create its folder in My Documents and numerous registry keys referring to this folder.
2. Decide where your project code should live. In My Documents, I have a Projects folder already.
3. Decide where you want the other VS files to live. I created an Application Data folder in My Documents to make a home for my Visual Studio folder. Another good choice would be to use the local application data folder.
4. Search the registry for “\Visual Studio 2008″. Edit the matching values to reference the new locations you picked in steps 2 and 3.  On my system, there were about 25 values to change.
5. Move the actual Visual Studio 2008 folder to the new location.
6. Create en empty file named Visual Studio 2008 (no extension) in the place where the VS folder was.
7. Run the following command on the empty file:
   ATTRIB +S +H +R “Visual Studio 2008″

Steps 6 and 7 make it more difficult for Visual Studio to create a new folder in the wrong place. As there is an existing file of the same name, the create should fail. By applying the system and hidden attributes, the file is not visible in Windows Explorer under typical settings.

Japan has an interesting shape – skinny with an elbow. There’s northern Japan, and there’s western Japan. The elbow, of course, is Tokyo, the geographical and cultural fulcrum of the nation.

The reddish line on the map shows my travel path. The circles represent represent the places we visited. The places are, in order from southwest to northeast:

• Itsukushima, aka Miyajima
• Hiroshima
• Himeji
• Osaka
• Nara
• Kyoto
• Tokyo (the big circle)
• Utsunomiya
• Nikko
• Fukushima
• Sendai
• Matsushima
• Morioka

Note that we didn’t visit in that order. Actually, we started in Tokyo and made separate jaunts to the west and to the north. Outside of Tokyo, we spent no more than a day at any single location. Tokyo itself was allotted a full week of exploration time. Traveling with a wonderful pair of native guides – my in-laws – we packed an amazing number of experiences into a two-week span.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be posting a separate article for each destination, along with articles about particularly fascinating aspects of Japanese culture.

Despite having been a spectator of the blogosphere for a decade (i.e. since before our species actually knew the word blog), I have resisted any temptation to set up my own blog. I’m just a random guy, living in a place, going to work, doing things — nothing spectacular. To me, blogs are not only for people who have something to say; they are also for an audience that wants to listen. What’s the point of wasting hundreds of hours editing articles which nobody will read? That makes as much sense as write-only memory. It’s much easier to be a consumer rather than a producer.

Basically, this blog is my wife’s idea. She has this enormous network of family and friends spread across the planet. I have a tiny family and few friends, most of them living within a fifteen minute drive. Part of being married is that these friend-family sets eventually merge. It’s now my task to help in the upkeep of our merging network — providing updates, distributing photos, sending gifts, etc. So, there is now a sizable audience and the mandate to communicate with them. For the first time since there were blogs, there is now actual reason for me to have a blog.