Japan Travel Guide

The Japanese are masters in the art of keeping in touch, but for a supposedly high-tech nation their communications infrastructure can at times seem rather old-fashioned. It's not unusual, for example, to see post office staff counting on an abacus. Public telephones are available in the most unlikely of places, including on top of Mount Fuji during the climbing season, but few allow you to make international calls, and Internet cafés are thin on the ground outside the main urban centres. At least every convenience store has a fax machine for public use, and at all the major stations and top bookstores in the cities you can buy English-language newspapers and magazines