The Japanese are masters in the art of keeping in touch, but for a supposedly high-tech nation their communications infrastructure can at times seem rather old-fashioned. It's not unusual, for example, to see post office staff counting on an abacus. Public telephones are available in the most unlikely of places, including on top of Mount Fuji during the climbing season, but few allow you to make international calls, and Internet cafés are thin on the ground outside the main urban centres. At least every convenience store has a fax machine for public use, and at all the major stations and top bookstores in the cities you can buy English-language newspapers and magazines

Mail
Japan's mail service is highly efficient and fast, with post offices (yubin-kyoku) all over the country, easily identified by their red-and-white signs of a T with a parallel bar across the top, the same symbol that you'll find on the red letterboxes.

Mail and telephone glossary
See glossary...

Phones
You're rarely far from a payphone in Japan, but only from certain ones - usually grey or metallic silver and bronze colour, with a sign in English - can you make international calls. Because of phonecard scams, it's sometimes difficult to locate...

Faxes, email and the Internet
Most hotels and youth hostels will allow you to send a fax for a small charge, while receiving a fax is usually free if you're a guest. Alternatively, most central post office or convenience stores (often open 24hr) have public fax machines.

The media
If you read Japanese, Japan is a news-junkie heaven, with 166 daily national and local newspaper companies printing some 70 million papers a day, more than triple the amount for the UK and even topping the US and China, despite both having...