And you are here why?

General Carry Cash!!! : Most places take cash.  Some places take credit-cards, but it is kinda rare.  This can be particularly annoying at train stations, when you need to top up your Suica card (see below), and the vending machines never (?) take cards. ATMs are not open 24x7!  OTOH, look for a 7-11, there are plenty, and usually have ATMs in them 7-11s also have excellent food in them.  In particular, the cold nori-wrapped hand rolls are awesome .  (Really) Lookout for the owl / cat / bunny / robot / maid cafes.  They are more fun than you can shake many sticks at. Travel There is plenty of signage everywhere.  Once you get past the initial sensory overload, it all starts making sense :-) The vending machines have an "English" option. Again, if you can't find it, its because of sensory overload.  Take a deep breath, and look again! People are helpful. Very  helpful.  There are information booths most ev...

The Solow model says many things , but one of the highly observable ones is that the income levels of poor countries will tend to converge towards that of rich countries.  More to the point, it'll converge towards those rich countries with similar characteristics. The point? Ah. The point being that if the country that is going to eat your shirt ( China! Japan before that! Germany! etc.) is starting from a lower baseline than you, odds are that the closer it gets to you, the more it slows down. Or, to put it differently, you can't assume that a country is going to grow at 8% for the next 20 years just because a country grew at 8% for the last 20 years.  So yeah, 20 years from now, China isn't going to have flying cars and free ponies. Noah Smith has a pretty good take on this based on the question - What happened to Japan in 1991 ? As he puts it Basically, by 1990, Japan had caught up to the richest large nations in terms of per capita GDP. The only way for Jap...