[linguae]

On the other hand, roughly $50-100/night gets you a clean, though tiny, place to stay at a business hotel in the Tokyo metro area. (For those of you unfamiliar with Japan, a business hotel is a type of hotel that offers rooms primarily for people on domestic business trips. The rooms are tiny [think the size of a college dorm room, sometimes even smaller], but at the hotels I've stayed at, the service is friendly and the staff does a great job with cleanliness.) By comparison, there are parts of the United States where you have to pay more than $100 per night for a dodgy motel in an unsafe area. I generally stay at business hotels whenever I take a trip to Japan, whether it is for business or for vacation.