mtfester@netMAPSONscape.net a $(D??(Bcrit :
> It was weird; a large (about 40%) of the guests were foreigners. There was
> a large contingent of Taiwanese here.
>
> We actually ran into an awful  lot of Taiwanese/Chinese on the Honshu part
> of the trip

Good to see many tourists are still coming to Japan, but I wonder what 
the fact there was so few japanese means about the economy. Maybe it was 
too near from the golden week.

I was once going around one week *after* the golden week, and everything 
was just almost completely empty, I have been the only guest in two 
different youth hostel in Hokkaido (in the second one, there was also an 
American on the first of the two day I stayed there, but the first one 
had been completely empty except for me for the two nights I stayed 
there. It was a bit ghostly especially with the extremely old 
vision-impaired couple running the thing, using a very large magnifying 
glass to look at any paper).