It's an article of American faith that Japan is an incredibly strange place. The world has been mapped and GPS'ed to death ruining much of the thrill of discovery. There probably aren't any hidden cities with remnants of lost civilizations lurking in the deserts of Africa or the jungles of South America. That just leaves the land of the rising sun as the X on the map, the strange place that suggests that the world that we know all too well, might still be odder than we can imagine.