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Originally Posted by aychseven
what about buying train and subway tickets? is there a machine with english readout or is there a ticket booth with people that speak english? i've never ridden a train or subway before (las vegas is so spread out that you need a car here and the bus system is really terrible.)
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In Tokyo chances are pretty good there will be romaji or hiragana on the machines in most stations. But that's why I recommend looking up the kanji's for relevant stations and keeping them in a notepad just in case. Ticket booths with English speakers is also hit and miss, but they do exist. I'm sure you'll probably be just fine. And if all else fails, I've found that if you stand in the middle of a station and look confused for long enough, eventually someone will come help you out. The Japanese are very good that way.
Also, I missed this link above, but you'll definitely want to check out
Tokyo Metro Co.,Ltd. (Tokyo Metro). This is the page (in English!) for the Tokyo Metro subway system. There's a lot of info and if you click on "English" right on the front page it has a map of the whole thing. It looks big, bad and ugly, but it's not. I promise! You'll find there are actually several ways to get to Azabu Juban.
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oh and food! are most menus in japanese only, or are there usually pictures you could point at? i've eaten at plenty of japanese places, so if the names were in hiragana or katakana i could probably figure it out. i'm not quite adventurous enough to randomly point at something on a menu i can't read, and i'd rather not get stuck hitting up a combini for 3 meals a day because i don't know kanji.
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You'll be fine on this one too. As mentioned in a previous post, if you don't have hiragana or romaji, you'll at least have plastic models of the food. Also, since you're already familiar with food names, you can just ask someone and they'll be more than happy to read the kanjis for you!