The Language Barrier
If it's your first time traveling to an unfamiliar country, you may arrive in Japan, look around, and realize with a start that you can't read any of the signs. You may feel a bit disoriented or even culture-shocked. Yesterday, you were a fully competent and literate human being, and today you're reduced to a dependent without even a basic education. This happened to me some years back, when I traveled to Korea, Japan's closest neighbor. I couldn't read the menus in restaurants and couldn't decipher Hangul (Korean letters). Had I been with someone who could speak Korean, it would have been easier--but even so, I'm glad I went. Your first visit to Japan will present some challenges. But rest assured that Japan is a safe place, and most people will go out of their way to be helpful.
If you have already studied Nihon-go, the Japanese language, make use of this knowledge, gather up a few guidebooks, and you're ready to pack. If you don't know Japanese but have a good ear, a sense of humor and a skill for drawing and pantomime, pick up a good phrasebook (try starting with the basic one in the Resources chapter of this book) and try to learn as much as you can during the trip. Take along a chart of the two phonetic syllabaries. The 46 square-shaped letters (each letter represents a syllable) are called katakana, and the 46 rounded letters are hiragana. The corresponding letters of the syllabaries are pronounced the same, even though they look slightly different (just like the printed American alphabet versus one written in cursive). If you master katakana, you will be able to read the menus in coffee shops and western-style restaurants. Katakana is also the script used to write foreign names and places.
(excerpt from p.56)