Photography
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I took the opportunity of this trip to buy some new camera equipment, my first new SLR since I bought a Canon Tlb in 1974 prior to leaving for a year of study in Munich.  I considered all kinds of cameras and seriously thought about buying everything from a Contax T2 to a Mamiya 7.  At one point I would have bought a Hasselblad X-pan, if I could have found one for sale.  At the time of my research (early 1999) I did not seriously consider going purely digital.  

Ultimately I purchased a Canon A2E with four lenses.  For this trip I brought a 50mm f/1.4, a 28-135mm IS, and my favorite lens, a 17-35mm.  Most of the pictures I took in Japan were with this wide-angle zoom.  The shot of Tony at Ryoanji is a good example of its capabilities.  I think I only used my 28-135 on a couple of occasions, because I had brought it.  I used my f/1.4 "normal" lens in the evening; the shot of McDonald's in Kyoto was shot using it.

I shot mostly Velvia and Provia and some 800-speed print film.  I experimented with filters with mixed-results.  I used an intensifier with a polarizing filter which gives many of my slides an overly purple tinge, which I find myself trying to eliminate digitally.  You can also see examples of vignetting caused by the filters with my 17-35 at 17mm; I knew this would happen but it doesn't bother me at all.

I shot six rolls of slides and six rolls of print film.  I tried to get my slides digitized onto CD-ROMs when they were developed by Kodak and found this to be exceedingly difficult.  They not only took weeks to do this but also returned one set of slides taken at Miyajima without digitizing them.  I don't understand why slide film is such a big deal in terms of having it scanned but I would not use slide film again because of this problem.