[steven]

I had some books in college that were interesting. They are a bit dated, but are suprrisingly accurate in some areas (while also surprisingly innacurate in others).

"Communicative Styles of Japanese and Americans" by Barnlund is a decent one. It talks a lot about language and communication (which often goes beyond simply language in the general sense). I think it has a lot of explination of the "between the lines" styles of English and Japanese which might something to look at.

"Doing Business with Japanese Men: A Woman's Handbook" by Christalyn Brannen, Tracey Wilen was one of my favorites. It's good for a laugh sometimes, too. Even though I'm a guy I learned a lot from this book. It is pretty old, although a lot of it hasn't really changed. A lot of it is written by the people who had different kinds of experiences. Some of them have advice on how to handle it (some is good, some isn't). Even though you can laugh at a lot of it (and some of the parites involved look at it humorously), it does reveal a lot of the darker (depending on your perspective) things in Japanese society.

"Japanese Beyond Words: How to Walk and Talk like a Native Speaker" by Horvat is another one that has some neat stuff about it. It talks a lot about culutral differences and has a lot of little anecdotes.

There are more... some are better than others, but I think these books give a pretty good insight on a lot of Japanese culture that foreigners are concerned with. None of these books are "cover to cover" books in that you can open them up and read a little portion and get some knowledge like that. They might be discontinued, but I recall picking up used copies on amazon. I got one for like under 20 cents if I remember correctly.

Edit: As far as writing a book with a main character from a place you've never been to before and having him/her go around to famous places that you don't know much about goes, I personally think you might want to reconsider. You might as well make it about a fictional place LIKE tokyo or whatever, because it's gonna end up like that anyways. Assuming he/she's in tokyo, most of the people they will interact with will be Japanese, too... which will be extremely difficult to pull off. At any rate, if you are interested in Japan and want to learn about what people are like, those books that I mentioned might help you get started before you take a dunk headfirst.