Customer Reviews
The best of the major guidebooks on Japan - By: Greshon, 11 Mar 2008 
This is the best of the major guidebooks on Japan. Much more information than Lonely Planet & the DK Guide, & better all round, too, than Fodor's. What's here is first class, solid, useful, insightful stuff. A new editon has since been published.
Lots of very bad things about this book - By: Giles Hogben, 17 May 2005 
I'min Japan & feel moved to tell other potential readers about problems we've had with this guide. First off, the index is terrible - many important names & places which are actuallyin the guide if you look through it, do not appearin the index. In a guidebook, you need to be able to reference things quickly to find out where you are.
Secondly there are huge omissions & inaccuracies. The guide says for example that you need an international drivers licence to hire a car. We managed it withoutin 2 places - with a normal UK licence. We arrived at a place last night & looked up the hotels. There are no pricesin the guide which makes it difficult to assess which one to go forn & directions are very sketchy. In the end a japanese person looked one up on the internet which was right next door to one of the onesin the guide but a third of the price.
When travelling around by car, the maps are woefully inadequate, & mention a lot of places without giving any information about them at all. With the result that we were driving around desperately looking for a hotel late at night.
Finally the language section is not adequate. It doesn't have the word for a carin the travel section for example. It doesn't recommend a dictionary to buy before you go (with transliterations). Overall very frustrating & I felt it had let me down.
Good general info but starter reference only - By: , 10 Sep 2003 
As it's names suggests, this book is a good comprehensive & readable rough guide to Japan. However, if you want a more in-depth source of info you'd be better off contacting the Japanese Tourist Office & asking them to send you pamphlets & maps. There are places which are not covered by this book & many rural places are mentioned onlyin passing. There are sections where the authors have clearly visited & remembered enough to write down directional guides, but on the whole, I'd say that the book provides an overview of what's on offer. Overall, I'd recommend it to someone who has never visited Japan, but to get the most out of your holiday, I'd use this as starter reference only. My only gripe is that there aren't enough pictures & you don't get a feel for the places.
Sogoi!! - By: L. C. Jones, 04 Feb 2002 Without a shadow of a doubt, the best & most authoritative guide available on Japan. TRG won the Travel Guidebook of the Year Award, & for good reason. Like all TRGs, the Japan edition is broken down into several logical & intuitive sections, beginning with 'the basics' (getting there, climate data, health, insurance, sports, etc.), going through all the various regions of Japan & finishing with a section called 'contexts', which deals with history, religion, arts, environmental issues, language & so forth. Like the majority of guidebooks, there is a large emphasis on the capital, with a good chunk of the book devoted completely to Tokyo, but unlike other capitals, the megapolis of c.23m people probably deserves the treatment & still not everything is covered. Unlike its poorer cousin, the Lonely Planet series, the Rough Guide doesn't goin for scorning attractions or areas, but the text is laced with good advice & enough value judgements to help you spend your time wisely. The authors have done a splendid job of rooting out some real gems & are not obnoxiously opinionated, something which always grates when one is reduced to referring to Lonely Planets. TRG has surveys of accommodation, restaurants & entertainments for each area; it covers the whole price range butin doing so can become scanty if you are always, for example, on a low budget. The text is dense & stuffed with maps which comein very handy indeed. My only criticism of TRG is that, like all products that have to be commercially viable, it doesn't really cater to minorities, e.g. gay & lesbian travellers/residents. This is - to an extent - understandable, but no excuse not to provide better links to alternative sources of information. Otherwise, a thoroughly-researched & comprehensively accurate tome (in 4 months I have found only 4 inaccuraciesin it, two of them numerical & of no significance, one a outdated phone number & one an inexistant website). If you are visiting Japan for any significant length of time, buy this book.
A very good guide book with a host of useful information - By: j.lovick@ucl.ac.uk, 06 Jun 2000 This is the first time that I have been travelling with a Rough Guide book & I found it invaluable. Not only was it good at pointing out places of interest, but it also contained very useful information about travel arangments to the places along with prices. It also contained great stuff about accomodationin various cities & towns which we used on a number of occasions to geat success. When I next go abroad I will definitly pack the relevant Rough Guide book.
