Most things you can take care of when you arrive in Japan, but buying a plane ticket isn’t one of them. Sure, you can get here by boat, but planes are so much faster. We used Orbitz to get our tickets, but if you look at the websites for the Japanese airlines (ANA, JAL) sometimes you can find amazing last-minute deals – sometimes as low as half the cost of a regular ticket. If you have flexible travel dates, I would highly recommend this. I also recommend ANA should you have the choice – they served us 2 good meals and every seat had its own personal television screen with on-demand programming. It was the best of the five intercontinental flights I’ve ever been on (Delta was also nice, 11 years ago, but the KLM flights were uncomfortable and crowded).

Other things you should look into before you come: JR passes. You can’t buy them in Japan, you have to buy them before you leave, and if you’re planning to travel all over the country they are probably worth it.

If you’re staying in the country for more than a couple days, you will want to look for hotels or apartments with weekly, monthly, or half-monthly rates. The weekly rates can be less than the cost of five days at a daily rate, and the monthly rates can be lower than the cost of three weeks at the weekly rate. There are lots of hidden pitfalls in housing, though, and a few of them nearly threw me for a loop. The first and probably the most obvious thing, rates are usually given per person, not per room. You can find places that only add a small fee for a second person, or give prices for single, double, and twin rooms instead, but many guesthouses and most hostels only have the per person price.

If you are staying in a monthly apartment, you really, really need to look at all the fees. The rent may seem reasonable, but you need to find out if you have to pay extra for fire insurance, utilities, common room fees, linen cleaning fees, futon rental, or anything else like that, because those can add 5000-60000 yen to an otherwise reasonable rent. Also, find out exactly how much of your refundable deposit is actually refundable, I’ve found a place that will only give back at most 6700 yen of a 30000 yen ‘refundable’ deposit(it was in the small print). To be safe, you may just want to consider your deposit part of the rent. Other things to consider: does it have a shower or bath? Is it free or do you have to pay? Do they clean the place, or are you expected to? Do they have AC? None of these were things I would have thought of before.

Our experience: We found a nice place just outside of Tokyo whose monthly rate + deposit(nonrefundable) worked out to just about 2800 yen per night for a single room with free showers and kitchen area and people on staff to make sure the place is nice and tidy. We’re hoping to have the same luck in Kyoto/Osaka.

So far, I already underestimated how much travel would cost – I expected it to be about 200,000 yen, but we’d spent $1600 on plane tickets and $1400 on JR passes before we even entered the country. Being outside of Tokyo also means that we have to pay an extra 500 yen each for the all-day Tokyo Metro Passes(totaling around 1150 yen each, I can’t remember exactly), but they’re still a big savings if we want to go very far into the city, and we’ve been getting the most out of them by doing as much as we can in Tokyo one day and then staying in our room to recover the next. My new estimate for travel expenses for 2 people for 2 months: $3800. I’ll let you know how that one works out.

We’ve spent less than I expected on housing so far (78,000 yen versus $1000), but we’re leaving here on June 16 and traveling with our rail passes for several days, so those savings may disappear soon.