So, well, I've been in Japan for over a month now (I came on September 26th), and I figured I'd write about it.
Japan is beautiful. I'm living in Matsumoto, which is surrounded my mountains, and...just wow. It reminds me of British Columbia. The people are all very nice, work is fun (if a bit slow) and getting around is easy and affordable. I've made a ton of friends, both Japanese and some people that I've met through the JET program.
The thing that gets me about Japan is how clean everything is. There's rarely any litter on the ground, partly because people just don't litter, and party because companies will often go out once a month or so and pick up garbage. This lack of garbage is strange too, in that there are vending machines everywhere and VERY few public garbage cans. When you do get to a garbage can, there're always 20 of them, where you have to tear apart your garbage sort it by weight, colour, coefficients of friction, index of refraction, bouancy, etc. (actually, there are just 5, but still). I just put everything in the bag that says 'Burnable.'
Partying is a blast. I have a new food every day - at least. Sashimi is great - I've even had raw horse meat. I can't say I'm a huge fan of cold soba though. Beer is expensive if only because they don't have pitchers. Also, finding imports is really hard. I miss my Stella Artois - not that Japanese beer is bad. Sake's good cold, not my favourite warm (they serve it both ways). Japanese popular music is, for the most part, pretty bad. It's very manufactured, and it seems like all of the biggest bands have their own line of toys to go with it. That, and singles sell for about $30. I've found some good not so mainstream bands that I like though.
Matsumoto is an old castle town (in fact, the castle still exists), so the streets were designed to confuse an invading enemy. Yeah...
Stuff is inexplanably expensive here, and there is this strange hip-hop culture. Jeans start at about $100. T-shirts at about $40. Watermellons sell for about $100. Ramen is cheap though
. Eating out isn't too expensive either. Imported goods are crazy expensive - the hair gel that I use in Canada costs about $7, here - $30. Same stuff. Weird.
Sexism here is pretty bad. I've given up on Japanese TV because of it. The females on tv are cutesy, pretty, but absolutely weak human beings. If I see another pigeon-toed 25 year old woman with Hello Kitty on her purse I'm going to be sick. Even in real life, when a man gets off the train, him and his wife bow to each other, then she carries his bags, walking behind him. Weird.
The Japanese language is both simple and beautiful. There are three alphabets (plus romanji - roman characters). Hiragana and katakana are similar to our alphabet in use (albet with 46 characters), although each letter is strictly phoenetic. Kanji, on the otherhand has 1900 non-phonetic characters. You need to know about 1000 to read a novel. Yikes. Each of these kanji has a meaning associated with it. Tokyo for example, is two kanji - Too 東(pronounced toh-oh), meaning 'east' and Kyoo 京(kyo-oh) meaning capital. So Tokyo is literally translated East Capital. At first, this seemed like overkill (in that if you don't know a kanji, you can't just sound it out), but one of the benefits that it has is that China and, to a more limited extent Korea use the same characters, which allows for written communication although the languages are different. Counting in Japanese is also strange. They have a different counting system for everything. Even food is divided - asking for two bowls of rice is different than asking for two plates of soba. Strangeness.
Anyway, I'll add to this as time goes on.
It took a while to get her to stop doing that, and she's behaving nicely now 
@ Other strange things about Japan.
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. It's pretty obvious though. I must say that Japan has the absolute worst drivers that I have ever seen.