Japan, Part I

Earlier this year, my parents invited my brother and me to join them on a two-week trip to Japan in the second half of June. It was my first trip to Asia, let alone to Japan. The closest I’d been to Asia before this summer was Istanbul. The parents of one of my high school friends had gone to Japan a few months earlier, and they lent us a bunch of their guidebooks and other materials, including a copy of Japanese for Dummies, a book of kanji with translations in English and Romanian (but no Japa...