It started with Anime and then lead deeper into the culture of Japan. If you have gotten this far then you have a taste too. I've really become addicted to Raman and my friends have come to love an orange drink from Asahi. The best places to the real stuff, although English is a second language, are: 

        Yaohan: 4240 Kerney Mesa Dr., San Diego. Great Raman.

        Yaohan: 595 River Rd., Edgewater, NJ. Bigger that SD.

        Kims Grocery, Salisbury MD. SBY's place to be.
So the first thing that you need is a beckoning cat and you can find out about it at: HAPPY CAT. This is the most important thing to get. Cats have been drug into work and have traveled to Greenland. These are the best.

Language

If it were pure Hiragana Japanese would be total cake. Hiragana is a phonetic alphabet for Japanese and makes a lot of sense. So to increase the difficulty factor all foreign words are converted to the Japanese phonetic and another alphabet is used called Katakana. To top it off add Kanji, the Chinese characters, for nouns and now it is rough. With Kanji the only way to know it is to memorize it. For magazines there are only two of note. Mangajin a good magazine for learning Japanese. This will be a big help and get you slowly started. On the obnoxious end of the spectrum is Giant Robot, always a fave. Friends of mine, yes Droid I'm talking about you, have become total Giant robot freaks. If you are interested in the language you might want to try Learning Japanese. More resources are:

Jeffrey's Japanese<->English Dictionary - Gateway

JAPANESE LANGUAGE WITH JAPANESE TUTOR!

Japanese language resources

NJSTAR Chinese Software / Japanese Software / CJK System Good software for reading Japanese on the web.

Newspapers

If you are interested in what is happening in Japan, give some of the following newspapers a try.

Asahi Newspaper English

THE DAILY YOMIURI

Welcome to The Japan Times Online

Pop Culture

Nihon-jin ( Japanese ) love pop culture and idol singers the most. An idol singer is a good looking person who puts out some music, usually of the disposal kind. A new kind of idol singer is the generated kind, such as Sharon Apple. Kyoko Date Info Page gives you information on a computer generated singer. An offshoot of a computer game is Tokimeki Memorial - forever with you and another page at Tokimeki Memorial - Forever With You. There is a character from this game that everyone wants to date. More pop links are at:

Welcome to j-pop.com

J-LINKS Meta-Index

Pop Idol Links from PHP Japan Interface

Info

For general info and tube stuff try:

Japan Information Resource Center

Japanese Information

Tokyo Broadcasting System, Inc.

Tokyo Q

What's New in Japan

FUJI CREATIVE CORPORATION

To actually E-mail so poor unsuspecting person try GALs and GUYs

Baltimore connection to Japan try Baltimore's Home Page - Japan