Sticker Shock Japan stands out. Usually, in travel, you face the choice of either visiting a country that is exotic, but less than sanitary, or a clean country replete with only the comforts of home. Comforts like Macdonald's, The Gap, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, the same dull, boring comforts that drove you to travel in the first place.
Japan offers the ideal, a combination of the truly exotic and the truly sanitary.
By the time you leave, everything you have will have been cleaned out, including your bank account. Struck with a powerful case of Japanophelia a few years ago, my wife and I took out a second mortgage on our house, sold off the livestock, and headed for the airport. Over the next two weeks, we would eat poisonous fish, sleep at mountain inns, and travel the length of Japan's main island, leaving a trail of hundred dollar bills like Hansel and Gretel's trail of bread crumbs. A Brief History Japan was settled a whole bunch of years ago by some people from the East. For centuries, they lived in harmony, but trouble was brewing.