neeps said:
My advice is to plan your shipment carefully. It can make a big difference in something feeling like home. Bring the pictures, books, art and leave the gravy boat at home. Remember scale, US stuff is so much bigger than the rest of the world. Furniture, cookie sheets, etc. A few transformers will make some of your US appliances work overseas.
I responded to shiny's PM a couple of weeks ago, but as far as bringing stuff goes, I would generally try to do without whatever you comfortably can for the duration. Though, if the company is paying for shipping, and if your home here does not come furnished, buying stuff here is likely to be expensive if you are not careful or savvy, which you won't be fresh off the plane. Maybe plan to bring only those things you will absolutely need in the first couple of weeks, for example. Since you've already spent a month in Tokyo before, you probably have a pretty good idea of what those things would be.
As you may recall, Tokyo power is 100 Volts, 50 Hz. This is close enough to North American standard that most modern electronics can handle both (computers, VCRs), but things like motors which depend on the line frequency (some clocks, hair dryers, kitchen appliances) might have problems. Note that transformers can only fix the voltage, and not the frequency, and hence are probably not useful for you. Radios and TVs won't fully work right because of somewhat different broadcast frequency bands used (though the analog video is NTSC; there is also HDTV, but I don't know if it is compatible with the US version -- I would guess not). This doesn't matter if you have cable, of course.
One thing that might be useful is a North American DVD player, if you plan to bring any DVDs with you, since Japan and the US are in different regions -- though there are some zone-free players floating around out there, too. On the other hand, if you plan to rent or buy your DVDs here, you will need a Japanese player. By the way, if you rent a DVD of a Hollywood movie here, it will have an English track available (menus to get to it will be in Japanese, though -- good practice!).
Also, a home computer (ideally laptop) might be good to bring along at first, since the Japanese keyboard layout might take some getting used to if you are a touch-typist, and the operating system will generally be in Japanese. On the other hand, once you have learned some Japanese, and if you are at all into gadgets, you might enjoy shopping around Akihabara at some point -- geek heaven.
One other piece of advice: learn katakana as soon as possible. English loan-words, which are quite common, are written in katakana, and this will give you a big leg-up on finding your way around and reading restaurant menus. Next is hiragana, then kanji (which you will still be learning by the time you leave...)
