make life easy – 8 tools for surviving Japan

This is not a post about learning Japanese. Nor is this a post filled with exuberant, detailed reviews of the following tools. However you WILL find some awesome e-tools to help you survive your first year (or two, or more) in Japan - unless you are super smart and have already mastered the language or have some super-ability to achieve fluency in less than a year. Even though I had a year of Japanese under my belt before coming to Japan, I instantly realized that I needed reference tools. And I didn’t want to carry around bulky dictionaries or cultural guides that everyone offered me. This is the age of e-books after all – I should be able to do everything on my computer or smartphone.

The following tools became imperative for communicating and trying to do simpler tasks without asking my co-workers to help me with everything. Hopefully they’ll be of some use to you as well (if you aren’t a Jedi-master of language learning).

Top 8 Survival Tools for Living in Japan (without much Japanese)

how much money to give at a Japanese wedding?

The recent wedding etiquette post “how to not make a fool of yourself at a Japanese wedding” brought about a lot of thoughts and experiences from fellow foreigners in Japan. Due to the slightly varying ideas regarding gift money, I decided to do a quick poll of Japanese folks on twitter to ask what they consider the norm. Interestingly enough, these responses also varied, but I pulled the consistencies from all the responses, both from Japanese and non-Japanese. One thing to keep in mind is that the gift money also covers the “meal fee” and gifts for the guests. Here are the results:

how to find a laptop with an English keyboard

Japan is known for its electronics. The name brands familiar around the world: Sony, Toshiba, Panasonic, etc. So finding a computer in Japan should seem like no problem. And really, it's not. At least not if you are OK with using a Japanese keyboard. Are Japanese and English keyboards really that different? Actually yes, they are. If you've ever tried using a Japanese keyboard for writing (typing), you'll soon realize just how impractical it is. The enter/return key is usually shaped like an "L" on a Japanese keyboard, with an extra button in between, making that conditioned reach over with the right pinky futile. Or the fact that the semi-colon and apostrophe requires extra button pushing, instead of the gentle one-finger tap. Even just writing e-mails can be a pain, and whenever I use Japanese computers, sometimes I grow lazy and just keep typing the keys that substitute those on the English keyboard, ending up with something that is sometimes undecipherable.

So what to do? In my hunting the last few days, here's what I've discovered.