You may have seen that Japanese pour drinks for others at parties. It is more polite to use both hands when you pour sake and to hold your glass while the drink is being poured to you.

Many place names in Hokkaido are derived from the Ainu language, like "Sapporo," which means "dry, large river."

In Hokkaido, we met a traveling Buddhist monk who had been walking along the coast of Japan for the past 6 years, relying on handouts for meals and sleeping on a thin plastic mat.

Gion Hatanaka is a very lovely ryokan with the concept of 'comfortable silence in the city'.

Although Hamamatsu, located near Mt. Fuji about halfway between Tokyo and Osaka, is most known to Japanese as the home of Tokugawa Ieyasu in the late 1500s while he waged battles in his quest to become shogun, today it's famous globally for its industry, which, admittedly, is not a sexy attribute until you learn that two of those industries are giants in the music and auto industry.