Japan is a cool place and very easy to get used to - despite the lack of English signs. With the Yen once again deflating, it might be a good place to try out for a few months. Osaka would be a good choice and also Yokohama is a nice place and less than an hour into Tokyo Station on bullet trains. Yokohama is a port city and has a very cool old passenger ship, now museum, from the 1920s-1930's that you can experience what trans-Pacific travel was like in that era. I went aboard - they had redone all the staterooms and restaurant as original. It made weekly trans pacific journeys to Seattle and back with a stop in Vancouver. During the war, it became a hospital ship.