After day 10 refused to end for 30+ hours I crashed and went to sleep.
I proceeded to sleep for 12+ hours every night for the next few.
It was kinda weird hear English again upon landing but I got used to
that quickly. The real struggle is dealing with the lack of transit
again, god damn was that convenient. I have come back to learn that
they've upgraded one of my bus routes to service every 15 minutes
though, which is sweet. But they'd cut another bus route today and
so half the buses literally weren't running with no announcment, yay.

Trying to get a feel for why cash felt different in Japan so I pulled
some from the ATM. That was immediately one source of the feeling:
they're relatively rare here in comparison. The only ATMs downtown are
on the university campus. I'm also pretty sure this coffee shop
doesn't take cash anyway. It might've partially been that money
management is better with cash because it's more tangible but I was
also shocked at how cheap the trip was. I spent something like 1/4
what I'd allocated, so I blew a chunk of the remainder on paying off
a student loan (better it kills a loan at 5% interest than sit in my
bank account at 0.5% or whatever my savings gets me.)

I promised a while ago to write up tips to basically "skip" your first
trip to actually overseas. I guess that's now? It'll be pretty stream
of consciousness like the other stuff so just kinda soak it in.

This one's probably mostly aimed at the Americans but don't sweat the
language too much. You can get really far on gestures, yes, no, 
thanks, sorry, excuse me, etc.

Cash is really important in Japan. All the best tiny restaurants are
cash only so you'll want it on hand anyway. It also keeps you from
having to do conversion math in your head. Every time you pay with
a card (nearly) you'll have to decide whether to pay in your local
currency or yen and try to figure out which rate is better.

Bring a fucking umbrella. Seriously. It won't rain on you every day
but the days it does you'll be incredibly glad to have it. If you
can't then every convenience store sells umbrellas for like $4.

Ditch your bags if it'll help. Just about every train station has
paid lockers where you can ditch your bags to walk around a while,
which you should totally do. I think I've heard the same about the
Koban? I never did that though. Also koban are weird because they're
like, police stations that are supposed to be useful? Basically all
they do is provide directions, act as the local lost and found, and
I guess they'll let you fill out forms if you need to. So if you lose
anything that's where you'll need to check.

Don't be afraid to leave Tokyo. You'll lose out on a lot of English
menus and stuff in the countryside but you'll get along fine. Probably
the best meal I had from a restaurant there was just a true family
restaurant. Dude was just smoking in his living room (which was also
the dining room,) had a bunch of random wrestling memorabilia around,
no English menu at all, and kept introducing random things as
"Japanese" in English when presenting them. Like he put down glasses
and was like "Japanese water." His ramen kicked ass and so did his
katsu. 

Oh, huge thing for Americans: you can actually trust transit there.
Trains and buses were on time even while under a typhoon watch. Even
when there were delays they were clearly posted within the station and
the officials in there were always happy to help out. Even the buses
were on time which is an impossibility here in the US.


OH. BIG ONE. You'll be expected to wear slippers there. If you're from
a bigger country (I'm like 1.8m/6 feet,) the slippers provided won't
fit. See if you can bring some in your size, I regret not thinking of
that. We're not talking like fuzzy bunny slippers, just basic ones
to keep you from walking across the floor barefoot or in socks.
Usually people will understand your bare socks when they see how you
don't even halfway fit into the slippers, though.

Honestly there wasn't a lot of big stuff to adjust to. I felt
comfortable almost immediately. Just don't be stupid, follow your 
senses before just copying (since there can be issues with politness
levels.) and remember that worst case you're a stupid foreigner who
doesn't know any better, so you get a remarkable amount of passes.
.