Not to sound like a jerk, but this sure seems like a goofy question. The prices are high because there are a lot of freakin' people trying to fly on a few seats. I've purchased tickets for $825 all-in (March '07) and $1500+ in the summer. Now a suggestion to reduce the cost is to do what I did in July when I needed to fly back to the states. The lowest price I could find from Beijing was ~$2100. Therefore, I booked an award ticket from PEK-NRT-PEK (20k in Y, 30k in F), and a sub $1000 ticket NRT-SFO-JFK-NRT.