MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: I'm still in Tokyo, suckers

> How easy is it to enjoy without speaking a word of Japanese? Sausage and ice cream in
> the same photo is hard to look at How far is it from where u live in Australia
> (flight time and such)?

Well, my wife doesn't speak much Japanese at all, so I kind of have a test case for this.

In Tokyo you can get by without much Japanese at all, as it's not too hard to find people who can at least understand a little English. If that fails, you can still buy stuff pretty easily by taking it to the counter, and order at restaurants by pointing at pictures on the menu. They'll show you the total price on a cash register or calculator if you can't understand. Trains go everywhere you need to go. If you get a JR East tourist rail pass you don't have to buy tickets for city trains on each ride, you just go to a manned gate and hold up your pass, so that minimises interaction and reading necessary to get around. The JR stations have most of the signs in Japanese, English and Korean, and the announcements on the trains are in Japanese and English. The essential phrases would be: "arigatou [gozaimasu]", "sumimasen", and "kore o kudasai".

If you go outside the big cities (e.g. Nagano, Niigata, or pretty much anywhere in Akita prefecture) it's hard to find anyone who speaks any English at all. There are places where you walk in and they're very worried about the prospect of trying to communicate, and they look visibly relieved when you tell them a Japanese menu is OK and they see you can read/speak/understand enough to get by. Actually my five-year-old got freaked out in these places. The feeling of not being able to read or understand anything and not knowing what to say really scared him. At a soba restaurant in Nagano where none of the staff spoke any English he wanted water, so I told him to say to the waitress (who was really lovely), "Sumimasen, mizu o kudasai." He just started crying. To him it's all just confusing babble.

So Tokyo is doable if you just smile and act like a naïve foreigner, but if you want to go out and explore the countryside you'll need at least some basic Japanese if you don't want to stick to overpriced stuff specifically done for overseas visitors.

It's about 7,800km from Sydney to Tokyo, and the flight generally takes between nine and ten hours gate to gate on a JAL 777-200ER.