The tones of japanese language?

Travel Info
I understand that many "oriental" languages have "tones" (for example, Mandarin has 4 tones; high, high rising, falling, and falling rising)

My question:

Does Japanese have a tonal system (as does for example Mandarin)?

I visited wikipedia.com, but it did not answer my question.

Thank you very much.

Travel Tips

I just had this conversation with my Japanese wife and her family. Their conclusion: words that have a common enunciation, but different meanings are understood not through tones, but through the meaning of the sentence. You don't relate a story jumping off chopsticks, but you may talk about bungee jumping off a bridge. To prove their point, they each said words that share a sound (niwa, hashi, etc..) but have multiple meanings and tried to guess which meaning the others were saying. They failed miserably.
In English, we have there, their, they're. Same pronunciation (depending on your dialect) different spellings, different meanings.
Some Japanese words are very close, but are spelled differently and this leads people to believe there is tonal importance. For example, byouin and byoin. One is a hospital, one is a salon, they are separated by a small u sound that is hardly noticeable. Sometimes, though rarely, even Japanese people make mistakes in which was meant (hospital or salon) in conversations with each other.
Others

Japanese does not have a lot of tonal words, but it has a few. Written phonetically the words for hair, god, and paper are all kami but the raising and falling of the tone distinguishes between them when they are spoken. There are probably other examples... but that's the most popular example.
No, they don't. But keep in mind that the word order is SUBJECT - OBJECT - VERB.
Japanese does not have tones. Of course there are variations in word stress and accent, as someone mentioned above, but there are no actual tones.

Many Asian languages are tonal, such as Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Laotian, etc., but Japanese and Korean aren't.

EDIT:

...Hmm, it seems that everyone is confusing 'tones' with word stress and accent patterns. Maybe they should check the definition of what a tonal language is before replying...

Japanese is not a tonal language... unless you also consider English to be a tonal language like Chinese is. For example, compare the stress in the word 'compress' : as a verb, the stress is 'com-PRESS' and as a noun, it's 'COM-press'. But these are differences in word stress, not tones!
Japan does have tones, but they are not as obvious (to my western ear, of course!) as Chinese. For learning Japanese as a beginner they are not terribly important, and most books do not teach them, but if you want to be natural in Japanese you must be aware. In addition, the tonal patterns change by region, and even I can detect Kansai-ben (Osaka area dialect) being spoken with the wrong intonation patterns, although I cannot detect the differences when standard Japanese is spoken.

The phrase "hashi no hashi no hashi", "chopsticks on the edge of the bridge", has each "hashi" with a different intonation pattern, and the pattern changes between Tokyo and Osaka accents, for instance.

There is a Wikipedia article on this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/japanese_pi...
No, Japan does not have tones like Mandarin does. The first woman who answered your question used Kami as an example. She is right in that it's a word that has different meanings. Yes, Kami (绱欍€€銇嬨伩銆€绁炴锛塰as three distinct meanings, but it all depends on how it is used; in context. It's always prounced the same. The same goes for Ima. Ima can mean living room or now. (浠娿€€銇勩伨). When written as the word "now" kanji is often used (the first example). So again, it really all depends on context, and when written, what kanji is used. I hope this helps. :-)