In Hiroshima, like most other places in Japan, Japanese is the main language. One interesting aspect of Japanese is that it has three alphabets: hiragana, katakana and kanji. Hiragana, which has 46 letters, is the first Japanese alphabet people learn. Katakana is like hiragana, but it is mainly used to write foreign words. For example, the world "America" is written in katakana, not hiragana. Finally, kanji actually uses Chinese characters to visually represent the meaning of the word. For example, the kanji symbol for "sun" actually looks a little like the sun, and the kanji for "person" actually looks like a person. Japanese has over 2,000 kanji characters!
The money used here is Japanese yen. Unlike in the U.S., credit cards are not widely accepted in Japan. Therefore, you always have to make sure you have enough cash when you leave the house. If you run out, though, you can always go to an ATM to withdraw more.
A bottle of water in Hiroshima costs the same as in the rest of Japan, around 100 yen, or $1. Japan has a very sophisticated system of recycling, which took a while to get used to. For example, there is a separate recycling bin just for plastic bottles.
