I was with a BYU MBA tour, so that made it pretty easy, but the few times that we tried to venture out on our own (none of us spoke Japanese) were kind of a challenge. For example, we went to a restaurant that had no pictures and no English on the menus, so we each just pointed to something random on the menu and hoped that the food would be good (mine was tasty, my friends' not so much).

It was fun and interesting, but also hard in that you can't fall back to some of the language and cultural similarities like you typically have in Europe.