Breakfast With Vikings, and Other Travel Tips

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• You've probably read that there is no tipping in Japan. However, if you go to a full-service restaurant, you will find that a consumption tax and service fee get added to the bill. By a strange coincidence, they will add up to 15-20% of the price of the food.
• Electricity in Japan varies from 100-110V and 50-60Hz, and three-hole outlets are nearly nonexistent. Your laptop power supply can probably deal with the first two, but you'll need to get a two-prong adapter.
• There's a subway line that runs past the convention center and several of the con hotels, but if you look for "Yokohama subway" with your favorite search engine, you will find something completely different. That's because the actual city-of-Yokohama-operated subway is on a different set of tracks; what runs past the convention center is the "Minato Mirai Line". I'd say something snarky here, except I remember living in the Bay Area, which I think has (or used to have) more overlapping incompatible transit systems than anywhere else in the world.
• Some public restrooms are open to both genders simultaneously. Women are expected to stroll nonchalantly past the urinals without looking.
• If you're taking the Narita Express from the airport to Yokohama, make sure you get in one of the back three cars, because the train splits at Tokyo Station. You want the cars going to Ofuna (大船).
• Noseblowing is considered too gross to be done in public, but spitting is common.
• The international symbol for "yen" is ¥, but you'll also see 円 used. It's the character for "circle" and is pronounced the same way, which incidentally is en, not yen.
• Japan picked up the idea of the all-you-can-eat buffet via the Scandinavian smörgåsbord, but the word they chose to borrow was "viking". I read this in Frommer's Tokyo, but I didn't believe it until I was looking at Japanese hotel Web sites and seeing that they all mention the price of their breakfast baikingu.
• Japan Rail bans you from bringing non-pet animals on board, with the exception of "a small quantity of small birds, small insects, baby chicks and shellfish placed in a proper carrying case." What I wish I knew is, what's the perfectly sensible cultural reason behind this? And what's a proper carrying case?

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