Lonely Planet Japan (Country Guide)

Review by mcsidious for Lonely Planet Japan (Country Guide)
Rating:
One thing you find about being in Japan for awhile is that no guide book can read your mind – you have to discover your favorite places for yourself. However, a book like this can be very helpful no matter how familiar you are with the country, and for newcomers it’s indispensable. Here’s why:

Lonely Planet does a good job of packing as much detail as possible into each section. Beyond the typical hotel and restaurant listings, they mention a wealth of transportation options in even the most remote areas of the country, they include cultural anecdotes about each region, and -most importantly- include plenty of Japanese script to help you find your way around, especially on rural rail lines.

They have a good sense of humor without being haughty (as many other travel guides on Japan do – such as Frommer’s), although one of their best quotes – the suggestion that the resort area of Hakone can seem like ‘a conveyor belt designed to strip you of your cash’ is nowhere to be found.

There are plenty of listings for bargians both in eating and accomodation – Lonely Planet has never been the wealthy man’s guide, although if you *are* swimming in cash, it will do you just fine.

Extensive maps with good detail. You might think this would be standard for all travel guides – but this is a detail that many of them overlook.

Lonely Planet is very good about warning you of potential tourist traps. This is especially important in Japan, where if you decide to sightsee in the same location as everyone else, you’ll feel like you’re heading to the bathroom during halftime of an NFL game. LP advises you of peak travel seasons to different areas of Japan that you may want to avoid to save money and beat the crowds. In Japan, fellow tourists in most cases will be other Japanese – lots of them.

LP has consistently produced the best guide to Japan out there and works hard to ensure its info is up-to-date. Other travel guides, for example, have STILL not noticed that a new shinkansen (bullet train) line was built from Kagoshima to Yatsushiro in Kyushu, shaving hours off the trip to Fukuoka, and that the name of Kagoshima’s central train station changed as a result. LP is the only book I have seen that noticed this major transportation development – in place for almost two years now.

Big sections on Japan’s most visited cities (Tokyo and Kyoto), with good suggestions for side trips for those on a tight schedule.

So why only three stars? First, there isn’t THAT much new material in this guide. If you are familiar with Japan and keep up with the news in the country, you can probably rely on older editions of this guide – there isn’t anything crucial meriting a purchase, unless you want a few more restaurant suggestions. If Japan is new to you, you need this most up-to-date edition, which will be your best friend – especially outside of Tokyo.

Second, LP’s editors sometimes seem to have a hard time making up their mind as to what parts of Japan are interesting and worth a look: in the last edition, the small northern city of Aizu-Wakamatsu was mentioned only in brief as a drab industrial city, but here it is covered in pretty extensive detail. Who suddenly decided to put Aizu on the ‘cool’ list? As I said above, only you can decide in the long run what things in Japan are best for you, but I think Aizu’s worth a visit (just don’t go in the fall unless you want to see the entire population of northern Honshu there with you).

Third, although I enjoy LP’s sense of humor, any guide that uses “frisky” and “volcanoes” in the same sentence is automatically disqualified from a five-star rating. Also, I can do without the left-wing rah-rahing that pops up in some places (though many ‘progressive’ world travelers enjoy that sort of thing, so it shouldn’t hurt sales). Finally, I would prefer that LP limit its use of the word ‘vibrant’ to 50 instances per edition. On a positive note, the horrible Sailor Moon inspired ‘anime’ drawing in the ‘Culture’ section, so obviously wrought by someone not Japanese, is gone.

All that aside, any visitor to or resident of Japan ought to have a copy of this guide. It’s a valuable resource and one of the few travel guides that -if not perfect- does everything right that it needs to and beats out the competition. If you’re considering a visit to Japan, this book should be your first reference.

Review by A. C. Johnson for Lonely Planet Japan (Country Guide)
Rating:
I highly recommend checking out the Amazon reviews written about the previous edition of this guidebook. Most of the negative reviews still apply to this version, which I recently used on a 3 week trip in Japan. While the book did manage to help me find many of Japan’s main sights, that is hardly a major accomplishment for a book like this. I expected it to provide me some in-depth “off the beaten path” knowledge about the places I was visiting, and on this mark it fails.

The book places a heavy emphasis on listing Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines as sights. However, the book only provides a one page, very uninformative description of what Buddhism and Shinto are. The only way I eventually learned enough about these religions in order to better appreciate the shrines and temples the book sent me to, was to go to an Internet cafe and read some Wikipedia articles about the subject. All it would have taken was a well researched 1 page essay on the subject. The fact that Lonely Planet was unable to even provide that minimal content speaks volumes about the failings of this book.

The book is even more useless when it comes to providing insight into modern Japan. Pachinko parlors, for example, are so ubiquitous that they are obviously a major part of Japan’s culture. However, the book doesn’t spend even one sentence talking about the activity.

Such omissions are quite a big deal for this country, for even at the biggest temples and shrines, English language descriptions are generally very unclear. In many cases, the guidebook was the only source of English information I had available. It became frustrating that the heavy book I was carrying around was such a poor source of answers to my questions.

On a practical note, the book’s lodging listings are too often very small bed and breakfast style places. While these are certainly nice if you get a reservation, they unfortunately fill up very quickly. More than once we ran into problems, because every single reasonable (

Review by Andrew W for Lonely Planet Japan (Country Guide)
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Clearly as the ‘Lonely Planet’ has metamorphosed from Backpackers Ltd. into BigBusiness PLC the underlying philosophies that prompted the original Lonely Planet to be born and take shape have gone out the window with the shabby furniture and the Commodore 64. En vogue instead we have designer cocktails and chic bars, lots of shopping, not-so-cheap-hotels, not-so-reliable-information (oh! and the ever present blind cartographer – who draws those ridiculous maps?). That is a charge I levy at the India, Thailand and Japan editions (thankfully I haven’t bought any others).

I know it’s hard to travel anywhere without the comfort blanket of a guidebook – but I really feel that in this day and age you’d be better off searching the internet printing out some web-pages sticking them in an A4 file and bringing them along to your chosen destination. Not only would the information be relevant to the individual, it would be a lot lighter than the LP, be a LOT more up-to-date and a LOT cheaper too. That said however, when I first arrived in Japan there weren’t so many good web-sites in English and so I opted for a LP Japan; I had a 6th edition copy. The points that frustrated me are too numerous to mention, they mostly revolve around shoddy information or complete lack thereof, half-truths sold as the real thing and a mentality toward the world and travelling that I find repugnant. To keep it brief I shall pick up three things form the Japanese edition.

Firstly the eternal lazy ‘refer to TIC’ instead of providing the information! I paid 16 pounds English for a ‘guide’ book and you instruct me to refer to the local tourist office for information…. ? am I missing something here…? isn’t that what a guidebook is ‘supposed’ to offer me… so I DON’T have to ‘refer to TIC’?? I actually mailed the LP offices on that point, but obviously they were all too busy on their yachts having cocktails to get back to me…

The second point is the sheer subjectivity of the writing. When I originally read the review on Osaka castle I was provided with a mental picture so horrible I felt it best not to go. When however a Japanese friend suggest we go, to which my response was to regurgitated the LP writer, my friend was somewhat bemused, anyway reluctantly I was persuaded and went to see the carbuncle, please allow me to quote directly “Osaka’s foremost attraction is unfortunately a 1931 concrete reproduction… the inside looks like a barn with lifts”… hardly an attractive write-up, and yet however what I saw was NOTHING like what had been described in the book! Osaka castle certainly ranks alongside Himeji, Okazaki and Nagoya, is well worth seeing and has a great interior with lots of exhibits; really no sign of a barn anywhere… I was really quite taken aback by the blatant falsehoods in the book and the huge disparity between the writers OPINION (keyword) and the REALITY – I even wonder if they ever actually visited the place. I assumed they were on a whirlwind tour of Asia and flew overhead on their way to their beach-hut in Kho Phangan or Koh Samui. That was until I met people who know some of the the ‘contributors’ and they supposedly actually have extensive experience of Japan and Japanese life; which makes the banal comments (of which there are too may to list) all the more surprising.

The third point is the very sketchy information about VERY famous places. I’ll use the example of Japanese pottery to illustrate my contention. Not only is Japanese pottery one of the most respected and admired in the ceramic world, with one of the longest histories. But Japan can lay claim to more active pottery districts than either of their close rivals (China and Korea) can. Take Bizen (Okayama) and Shigaraki (Shiga) at two prime examples, two regions that are still VERY alive and very active, very interesting and wholly worth a visit by anyone interested in the Arts or a day in the countryside. Bizen is treated to a whole 5cm x 13cm block of text, whilst Shigaraki gets a 5x6cm block to set out its 700 year history. And neither of the write-ups convey what I KNOW from experience the place is like or what it has to offer… impressed?

As LP Japan is a long-seller I think it wise that they clear out the old Japanophile clique and install an new editorial staff (including Japanese writers) who can overhaul the book and give it a new breath of life.

To be quite honest too, as a long-term resident of Japan I HATE this book even more now than I did at first. It would take me too long to explain and probably damage my karma so badly in the process that it wouldn’t be worth it. However, what prompted me to write the review was that I was planning a few day-trips recently around Kansai (including to the above pottery regions) and found this LP, when I re-read sections my toes just curled up with horror – and then I checked the internet for up-to-date information and was pretty disgusted by the gulf that exists between a book like this and the reality of things here. Not only that, but the prevailing attitude that seeps from the pores of this book would I wonder taint the visitor in a way that they would then miss the beauty of real Japan, I hope not.

If you are planning a trip here, then my advice is to get on a computer and keyword where you want to go and what interests you, please look beyond Kyoto and the temples and you will find a wonderland awaits you. Seek and ye shall find.

Thank you.