Product Description

the most detailed map coverage of any Japan guidebook lead author Chris Rowthorn is a long-term Kyoto resident, Japanese arts expert & sashimi buff Japan's culture & lifestyle is addictive: 38 per cent of travellers to Japan find themselves on a long-haul trip up-to-the-minute advice on getting the most out of your visit the Hamamatsu Matsuri, a spectacular traditional kite festival, turns into a kite-fight. Participants' kites battle to cut the strings of other kites, mid-flight 'Character dolls', the giant, cartoon-like statuettes that sit out the front of Japan's stores, are now being abducted in broad daylight and sold on the black market for up to USUSD3000 Japan received an honourable mention at the Pacific Asia Travel Association's 2004 Gold Awards

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #169523 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 812 pages

Customer Reviews

Lonely planet - safe option
I have just come back from a month long trip to japan, This book saved my behind on many occasions, but without any other guide books on japan to compare this to i will have to give it a 4 star, I found the information to be quite accurate... apart form distances and travel time (on foot) it would say 5 mins east... then 25 mins later in the humid heat and with a 20kg backpack on you arrive at the destination wishing you had taken the bus!

most travelers i met were also using the lonelyplanet guide and found it very useful!

there are very few pictures which leaves you uninspired when looking for things to do in each place! so check things out before you leave for japan

lonely planet is always a safe bet so buy in advance of your travels and make a rough plan... I would reccomend a couple of days in Tokyo and as much time as you can spare in Kyoto and Nara - the 2 most interesting places japan has to offer!

in conclusion - buy this book, i think you will struggle to find a better one for japan!
[...]

It's very good but ...
The book is of course very good but I have a gripe with LP that they concentrate too much effort on bars and discos (if the word still exists) at the expense of "culture". It's too full of (to me, unnecessary) details on where to get drunk at night. Matsuri - festivals - are what make Japan special. Without them, most of the country is fantastically ordinary; a matsuri in town can turn the very ordinary fanstastic. Some matsuri are included; most aren't, no doubt for reasons of space as there are so many. Maybe also because details and exact dates can be hard to pin down and can require a lot effort for non-Japanese readers. Inclusion of details on matsuri in the book is haphazard. Wakayama doesn't rate mention of any. Kanazawa has a tiny festival in April which gets full publicity. Fukui's enormous parade (Echizen Jidai Gyoretsu), which takes place around the same time not far away, again doesn't rate a mention. Hachinohe has two fantastic annual festivals but the town, which appeared in previous versions of the book, has been eliminated altogether from the current edition. So the festivals obviously don't get a mention. The major Inazawa Naked Man Festival (Hadaka Matsuri) I don't think rates even a mention either. Too many pities. It would be churlish to give the book less than 4 stars (there's so much good information) but I think booze sadly wins over culture. Maybe time to think of separate editions for different demographics?!

Written by teenagers, for teenagers
Having used this book in Japan as our main guidebook, we find it increasingly irritating. It has an obsession with listing all the gaijin hangouts, as if finding a pint of Guinness was the authors' main objective, but omits numerous interesting places to see.

The book is also very Tokyo-centric and - as other reviewers have noted - often takes a condescending tone when describing other places. The quality of the writing is generally quite poor. Where the authors attempt a "serious travel writing" style, they generally come unstuck pretty quickly.

Overall, the book is written in that 'we're not tourists, we're "travelers" ' style from the previous millennium and cannot be recommended to anyone over the age of 20.