This platform for surfing the Net via one’s cellphone was introduced in February 1999 by ntt DoCoMo. It quickly caught on with Japanese youth and became the biggest fad since karaoke or PlayStation 2. Soon after the launch of i-mode, Japanese teenagers were being called “the thumb generation” because they spent so much time tapping out commands on their tiny cellphone keypads. By early 2004, i-mode had more than forty million users, or about one in every four Japanese.

Welcome. You’ll often hear this greeting, or the shortened irasshai, as you enter a store, restaurant or bar in Japan. Sometimes the whole staff seems to be yelling it, which can take a newcomer aback. One of the worst inventions of all time is a machine that repeats a high-pitched “irasshaimase” as a person enters a store and an “arigato gozaimashita” (thank you very much) as he or she leaves.

A Japanese pub that usually has an extensive menu of little dishes to choose from. They range from vast places teeming with drunken college kids to quiet hideaways perfect for a double date. The typical drinks here are beer and shochu, a distilled alcoholic beverage. Several of the non-Japanese contributors to this book learned most of their Japanese in izakaya.