Wow what a thread. I can't really add much..I do enjoy reading the many intelligent posts on here however.
Now I've only lived in Japan (saitama/Tokyo) for 4 months in total. So you may feel that I don't qualify to give any real insight. But here is my negative list:
* The price of meat. From what I experienced, it was kind of hard for me to get a decent piece of meat, to a decent price. Chicken was OK priced, and pork wasn't amazingly expensive, but cow meat I could almost never buy. My meat intake was mainly in Yoshinoya
That might differ if you don't live in Tokyo though.
* Trains were crowded at certain times of the day. Altho this isn't such a big minus as they came so frickin' often. I would like some night trains though, so one didn't have to stay out 'til 6 every time. But I understand the purpose.
* Specialized restaurants not being very specialized. By that I mean that many of the italian or whatever restaurants I saw never had any italian people working there. This meant that the pasta (in this example) didn't seem very genuinely italian to me. Here in sweden it's not hard to get real genuine foreign food (for a decent price).
* The police. Maybe MMM or someone else more experienced than me will set me straight. But my experience of police in Japan was that they failed to act at the few occasions when I saw something happen. Whether it was a domestic disturbance at our guesthouse, or drunk 'gaijins' outside a bar, their work (as I saw it) was to me sub-par. Maybe some of it comes down to cultural differences, but in my view of the police anywhere a drunk guy trying to fight the police goes down before you can think to blink.
t.