Japan’s fascinating culture is unlike any countries and will leave an everlasting impression with you. This what makes it such a unique country to travel and explore.

Whilst it has a reputation for homogeneity, Japan is in fact a country of astonishing contrasts. Despite the concrete sprawl of japans post-war urban development, you can still find tranquillity in a brilliant-green, moss-covered temple garden or in the alcove of a traditional restaurant with its tatami-mat flooring, shielded from the other guests by shoji (paper screens)--- remnants of a not – so- distant past.

The Japanese themselves have no trouble wandering easily from one such context to another. Home again after a hard day at the office, the director of a consumer electronics company who wears a business suit in downtown Tokyo sees nothing strange about buying cigarettes form a machine located inches form a sacred Shinto shrine. Once home, he might change into a garish velour leisure suit or an elegant yukata (light cotton kimono), the traditional informal attire for both men and women.

Even Japan’s disaffected youth, normally sporting dyed hair, nose-rings, and torn T-shirts ( and whatever else constitutes the latest sweet fashions to be slavishly copied), will attend and important festival in an expensive traditional costume, perhaps indicating that, despite their parents’ concerns about their superficial appearance, some old values have not been entirely abandoned.