Links useful to those getting ready to spend weeks or months living in Japan
https://tinyurl.com/landinjapan gives practical advice to a recent USA college graduate headed to Hokkaido, but relevant to most parts of the country equally well.
https://fromsenseionline.blogspot.com is aimed at teachers and learners of Japanese language and life. It takes selected listserv items from the "Sensei Online" (yahoogroup, later googlegroup)
https://japanoutreach.blogspot.com is less about language learning, and more about social life and the cultural landscape in Japan.
AtlasObscura.com has a great collection of brief articles of offbeat facets of life on the islands.
Movies and visual experiences
Feature films and documentaries allow pausing, study, replay, and presented social situations that otherwise might never present themselves to you as an outsider. So it is worth exploring this medium. Photographs, also, provide a powerful way to familiarize yourself with the look and feel of the city and the countryside, the fashions and the ocean of visual information to learn, or at least recognize. Without a visual inoculation to the unknown universe of people, places, and things, your first exposure can feel overwhelming. So the more you browse ahead of time, the better.
Movies by ITAMI Juzo & by KOREEDA Hirokazu provide social scrutiny; criticism. For some historical texture and flavor, consider any of the 40+ Tora-san (protagonist) movies by YAMADA Yoji under the series title "Otoko wa Tsurai, Yo!" ('It is hard being a guy'). And classics from OZU Yasujiro re highly cherished inside and outside of Japan (Tokyo Story, or Ikiru, for instance)
Documentaries to consider include The Japanese Version (1995; 7-8 vignettes of topics imported but now rooted into Japanese life-some public libraries have this title in their steaming service providers), Understanding Japanese Culture (2020, life-long British anthropologist revisits original fieldwork town,40 years after the first months of residence). Trailers from Toko Shiiki's work relating to Fukushima 2011 aftermath: about 300+ years as Sake brewers, about evacuated Jr. high school music teacher who gets her band to the finals competition, and about the voices of survivors.
Photo sharing at Flickr has at least three ways to plunge into visual exposure. One is the searchbox. Another is the world map (drag and zoom to place of interest, then refresh by pressing the map's own green circular arrows at bottom center to repopulate images tagged to each spot). Then there are user groups like Japan Street Photography, or Osanpo Kamera, or Japan Deluxe, or perhaps the albums and photostream of an individual camera person like "TokyoShooter."
My own 2016 and 2017 pictures and commentaries are listed under the albums section, or converting them into ebook form, there is Life and Times Today in Rural Japan - volume 1: countryside. The other is Life and Times Today in Rural Japan, Volume 2: City Views.
Multimedia like the interview project by (Tokyo) Sophia University students talking to Fukushima survivors allows you to get to know part of people's lives up-close, Voices from Tohoku.
Books and articles
Understanding Japanese Society has been revised recently by anthropologist Joy Hendry and gives close-up, as well as big-picture discussion of life in the language and society of Japan.
Neighborhood Tokyo goes back to the late 1980s but still sheds light on the close-knit dimension of streets even in big cities.
Yokohama Street Life: The Precarious Career of a Japanese Day Laborer (2015) by Tom Gill follows his Day Laborers of Sanya (2001) book. Real lives far from the glossy surfaces of Japan.
2:46: Aftershocks: Stories from the Japan Earthquake is composed of real-time tweets flying around Japan and abroad beginning on the March 11, 2011 afternoon initial seismic shock of the Great East Japan Disaster. [ebook sold at No-Cost]
The Roads to Sata by Alan Booth (1985) chronicles his adventure from north to south in the days when the value of the Yen was rising and before the real estate bubble burst in 1993.
Walking the Kiso Road by William Scott Wilson retraces one of the main routes to and from the Tokugawa capital of Edo (today's Tokyo). He combines keen observation and lots of context drawn from traveler advice of that period.
Fiction is a way to glimpse some of the psychological dynamics of people interacting.
The Makioka Sisters by TANIZAKI Jun'ichiro is set in 1930s Kyoto
Okubo Diary by Brian Moeran (1985) about his fieldwork in rural Oita prefecture
The River Ki by ARIYOSHI Sawako (1980)
Convenience Store Woman: A Novel by Sayaka MURATA
Native English Speakers
Since the 1970s the Government of Japan and in the recent generation also local governments and school have employed English speakers to prompt freer conversation and thinking inside and outside the foreign language classrooms. Since this sort of contract work is well developed and supported, it provides a solid foundation for learning the life and society of Japan, giving as well as taking lessons for one's career. Recruiting, applications, and interviewing vary by sending country: Japan English Teacher, Assistant Language Teacher, or Assistant English Teacher - check with the nearest Japanese consulate or embassy for details (USA example: applications in fall, interviews follow, arrival for orientation the following June). Languages other than English: some cities and prefectures employed CIR (Coordinator for International Relations) to communicate with select countries/languages (e.g. Russian, French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Korean, among others). The Japanese consulate can point the way there.
STEAM - science, technology, engineering, art, mathematics
KIT-IJST stands for Kanazawa Institute of Technology - Intensive Japanese for Science and Technology. It has been doing 6 week summer sessions on the west coast of Honshu for 20 years or more, emphasizing the communication and miscommunication connected to S.T.E.A.M. education, along with cultural fieldtrips and experiences to break up the book and lab work.
