As thousands of fans travel to Japan to support England's footballers, Evening Press reporter CHRIS GREENWOOD, who lived in the country for two years, reports on what they can expect to find.

SUSHI is not the only food in Japan and everyone is not extremely short. The country is not packed full of smiling, grey-suited businessmen and television programmes do not all feature masochistic, bandana-wearing contestants surfing down gravel slopes on their bare bottoms. Few trees are bonsai-sized and everyone doesn't own a mini-disc Walkman or a micro-sized car.

These are a few of the things that I learnt during my stay in rural southern Japan but most of these statements are to do with generalisations and stereotypes. Englishmen don't all wear bowler hats and carry umbrellas. But then a lot of tea is consumed here and it has been known to rain occasionally. Sometimes expectations can come true.

And so it is with Japan, where visitors will be amazed by trains whose lateness is measured in seconds and a cancellation makes headline news. Raw fish is a speciality and whales often make the leap from sea to plate. Space is at a premium with people crammed in anywhere and everywhere - mortgages can take three generations to pay off. Hand-grown melons cost up to £50 each, but then who travels to an economic miracle for fresh fruit?

Japan is an enormous country with 120 million people packed into a complex landscape of mountains, rivers, and rugged coastline.

Much of the country's geographically less-friendly interior is sparsely populated and people crowd the coast, especially to the east of the largest island, Honshu.

It's a place where if you need a modern hi-tech airport you have to build an island to put it on but where acres of carefully-sculpted traditional rice paddy fields line the hillsides.

The country's length and geographical contrasts mean that the northern island, Hokkaido, offers skiing for nine months of the year while the isolated southern islands of the Okinawa archipelago are sub-tropical with beautiful beaches and hot, humid weather.

Television presenters chart the steady appearance of cherry blossom in the springtime as the warmer weather spreads from the south, as they do with the rainy season a few months later.

As you would expect in the land of the rising sun, there is a strong work ethic and long hours at the office are the norm.

Some may have heard of the phenomenon of "karoshi", or death by overwork, but in my experience Japanese workers held a healthy balance between work and play.

A determined approach to leisure time means sports and hobbies attract loyal followings and also ensures the neon-lit "snack" bars are packed full of drunken businessmen and dozing commuters.

Sumo might catch the eye as Japan's highest-profile sport but baseball is in fact a national institution and is constantly televised. Football, rugby and racquet sports are also popular, as is long-distance running.

Traditional martial arts such as kendo, judo and karate all have their roots in Japan and schoolchildren are taught gentler pastimes like calligraphy and tea ceremony.

Hungry visitors can expect to enjoy a country whose population is truly obsessed by food. Every town, city, region and locality has a speciality from fried octopus balls in Kobe to seafood noodles in Nagasaki.

Every season brings fresh variety and new flavours to menus at home and in restaurants and local produce is snapped up by customers.

Grab a bowl of noodles from a roadside stall for £2, a "bento" boxed lunch for a few pounds more or feast on a seven-course meal of rare delicacies in luxurious surroundings for £200, the choice is yours.

It's not all fresh fish and fiddly dishes. Steaming bowls of ramen, a meat-based broth with noodles in every flavour from curry to pork, will challenge the biggest appetite.

Home-grown rice is obviously the basis of most meals and it's not done to smother it in soy sauce. Neither is it acceptable to stick your chopsticks upright in your meal and leave them there or pass food between chopsticks - both are symbolic of death.

On the subject of table manners, it's encouraged to slurp your noodles and it soon becomes second nature as you realise it's the best way of getting as much into your mouth as possible.

Opportunities for the serious drinker are rich and varied too with great beers, Japanese rice wine, sake, and its stronger and deadlier cousin shochu.

Beer is most often bought in bottles and drunk out of tiny glasses. It's not done to pour for yourself in a social situation and if you've had enough, leave your glass full.

Japan offers a great opportunity to sample some truly weird things but also to hold a mirror up to what we accept as normal.

Who would have thought that a century of technical innovation would reach its peak in a heated, musical toilet seat with a space shuttle-like control panel?

How is it that in a country where all the popstars and models are tiny, clean cut and thin, that the ultimate sportsmen, and sometimes sex symbols, get dressed up like gargantuan babies and spend their time running into each other on a dirt square?

Vending machines, capsule hotels, hot springs, comic culture - it's a whole new colourful world out there so kampai!, or cheers, to seeing more of it during the World Cup tournament.

Updated: 09:03 Saturday, May 25, 2002