More bang for your Yen

The $15 book, which is sold on Amazon.com, is “more of a how-to book than a travel guide,” Shulman said. The book outlines travel strategies instead of specifics about where to sleep and eat. It attempts to help readers get to know the real Japan “without breaking their wallets.”

Each chapter also includes useful Japanese phrases, which Shulman included because he thought most people interested in visiting Japan are intimidated by the language and cultural barriers.

The idea for the book came before Shulman started at the University and was shaped by many of his life experiences.

Born in Tokyo, where his family moved for his father’s job, Shulman said he was “raised pretty much Japanese from the beginning: Japanese day care and Japanese friends.”

Growing up, he spoke Russian with his parents at home, English at an American elementary school during the academic year, and Japanese at a local school that he attended during the summer. When he was 12 his parents decided to return to Israel, where they had previously lived and where Shulman picked up his fourth language, Hebrew.

He lived in Israel as a teenager and entered the Israeli military when he was 18, but returned to Japan to work for an Internet security company from August 2006 to February 2007. It was then that he first thought of writing a book for tourists visiting Japan.

“[The idea] first came to me when I was in Japan working,” Shulman said. “I think I had a friend from Israel come visit, and we just got to talking about how I should write some kind of guide, mostly for Israelis.”

Gil Ronen, who has known Shulman for about 10 years and served with him in the Israeli military, also visited Shulman in Japan. “It just felt so cool to know that the way I was traveling was unique and that I’m getting this special angle on Japan while my friends were doing the regular hotel-plus-bus packages,” Ronen said in an e-mail.

“I think that Josh was gathering his impressions of Japan he wanted to share for some time now and that much of the research was done long before the actual writing part,” Ronen added.

But Shulman only wrote roughly one paragraph before entering Princeton as a freshman several months later in September 2007. At the end of the academic year, he decided to take two years off, during which he worked for an Israeli technology company and started his own marketing company, which creates 3-D real estate models.

He often took business trips while working for the Israeli company, and when he left, he decided to spend five months traveling the world on his own. Shulman returned to Japan in November 2009 and traveled for a month as a tourist, during which time he began putting his ideas to paper.

“At some point I was on the train and had some kind of inspiration,” Shulman said. “I wrote down all the tips and tricks and whatever I considered important for people to know. After that, it was hard to stop. I had to write the book.”

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Ronen said that in order for travel guides like Shulman’s to be successful, “there needs to be a solid base of experienced travelers that will come back from Japan and ... tell their friends about it.”

“I do believe that there might be some skepticism regarding what the book promises to its readers, but that will be an advantage when those promises are fully kept,” Ronen added.

Shulman also maintains a blog, “All-You-Can Japan,” to supplement the information presented in his book about Japanese holidays, food and customs.