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Living abroad I often find myself comparing the best and worst of my home country with that in Japan. How cool it would be to mix-and-match to create the perfect country precisely customized to my desires. Just as I may visit a friend's house and stare enviously at their newly-remodeled, granite-tiled bathroom; I visited Japan and exclaimed, "No guns! What a great idea!" However, as no country is perfect, there are things Japan could certainly improve upon if only it would sit for a brief lecture courtesy of the good ol' USA. And one area America excels at is anti-smoking legislation.
Read more: What Japan Needs - More Anti-Smoking Laws
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Anyone living in or visiting Japan is no stranger to walking around with a bucketful of coins in their pants/purse. The excitement before your first Tokyo subway ride soon quells as you're greeted by a flurry of coins spraying from the ticket machine like a Las Vegas slot hitting the jackpot. Tourism stamina wanes as you really start feeling that 10-pound metal load clinking in your pocket.
I don't know why Japan loves coins, but the reason rests in the fact their paper money starts at 1000 yen, roughly a $10 bill back in better economic times. During my years living here, I've developed a few techniques for coping with coin overload.
Read more: Living in Japan - How to Get Rid of Coins
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It's tough to beat a credit card's convenience, so I felt naked and demoted after moving to Japan and encountering a sea of rejection when trying to apply for a local credit card. True...I could use my US credit card, but that weak dollar / strong yen exchange rate right now would obliterate my US savings account. In addition, overseas card transactions are often denied by the vendor or credit card company or both; and sending money home to pay the bill effectively strips the credit card of its intrinsic convenience.
Damn, I wanted a local card. But at the same time I understood their reluctance to grant me one. I'm a gaijin, and everybody knows that we're the ones that commit all the crimes here. I could easily go on a crazy "Brewster's Millions" shopping spree and skip town. While jobless irresponsible American me managed to get a decent credit card as a college student, responsibly-employed living-in-Japan me failed time and time again.
Read more: How to Get a Credit Card in Japan
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Finding a good apartment or any apartment in Japan can be a real pain for foreigners. Most apartments require a guarantor on the lease, basically someone to vouch for you. Unfortunately, that often proves somewhat of a difficulty for us foreigners because no one wants to vouch for us hooligans :-(. If you're lucky, your company will sign as your guarantor. If you're unlucky (like me), they will not. Below I present a few foreigner-friendly, no-guarantor-required housing options that have proved quite handy to yours truly.
Read more: How to Find a Good Apartment in Japan
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I'll just go ahead and say it from the get-go: American culture just doesn't have as many privacy or modesty provisions built into it as Japan does. We Americans all want attention and fame and all the bling-bling that goes with it. We post YouTube videos documenting our morning's breakfast, personal blogs detailing sexual exploits, scandalous vacation photos, bitter gripes against our a-hole bosses, and our latest hit single played acoustic coffee house-style all in the hopes of going viral. "Anonymous tips" just don't exist in my home country. We want recognition, dammit!
Why? Maybe Hollywood just pays too damn well, inflating our high-cholesterol veins with gold-encrusted American dreams.
Conversely, Japanese don't want to be in front of the camera. They flee from the weekend camera crews filming in Ginza. Turn on the news and half the time they're
Read more: Attention-Hungry America and Shy Modest Japan: A Contrast of Entertainment Cultures
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Take your
Read more: Take Off Your Shoes