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Editorial Review :

Discover Japan

Dodge flying fish at the world's greatest sashimi market, p. 132
Find yourself spirited away to Miyazaki's museum of anime, p. 141
Master the perfect double-clap and bow for your first shrine visit, p.56
Earn your keep in a Buddhist temple, p. 417

In This Guide:

Japan resident authors, 343 days of research, 120 detailed maps, three geisha sightings
You asked for it, we researched it - everything you need to know about onsen (hot springs) and skiing and more language assistance than ever
Cost-saving tips even the locals don't know

Customer Review :

A Great Way to Get Unexcited About Your Trip to Japan

This Lonely Planet Guide is another copy of all the previous Japan guides with all the same disappointments.

Coverage of areas outside of Tokyo and Kyoto is honestly rather shoddy, and they've kept the obnoxious negativity that makes an exciting trip to Japan seem like a waste of time. While other Lonely Planet guides are lively, with authors that seem to enjoy the travelling, Lonely Planet Japan's authors write as though they really don't like Japan. It is questionable whether or not the writers even visited the cities they are reviewing.

This guide is probably most useful as a reference of places to look up on your own in another source.



Rating :

japan lonely planet

very informative and detailed. a necessary asset for japan vacation planning. i've used other guidebooks along with lonely planet but this is the only book i packed along in my luggage to the japan trip. i wish they had an electronic version though since it is also the heaviest and biggest.

Rating :

Very helpful

I bought this guide to Japan as I was going to be traveling around for about two months. The guide, although not indispensible, provided good information about cheap accommodation, perfect for my budget, and other measures to conserve my budget and things to do. Following suggestions from the guidebook I had some of my most favourable experiences in Japan, including going to a free outdoor hot spring, where there were no other people.

However, in many places the local tourist information offices are defenitely worth paying a visit, especially for maps, as the maps provided are not very clear nor detailed. I also found some of the places listed in the guide to have shut down.

The guide provides some useful background information about the culture of Japan, different types of foods to try out, and various etiquette notices on hot springs and other essential activities.

To conclude, the guide is a worthwhile buy, although in general it stays quite close to the tourist trail, and for the truly unique Japanese experiences off the beaten trail, very little is offered.

Rating :

Don't waste your time/money/vacation

This book was only marginally useful.
- The maps were ambiguous at best, and completely wrong at worst (on multiple instances in multiple cities).
- Descriptions of sights were often wrong or misleading (don't bother with the "Pentax Forum" in tokyo. the address is wrong, and once you find it, it's completely lame (old cameras, and you can't even play with stuff, contrary to the book)
- Does NOT have the actual cheapest budget hostels in Kyoto or Tokyo.
- I didn't really like the writing style, but that's preference
- the eating establishments they suggest are completely random and often not the best/cheapest/or most interesting.

everyone i met traveling that had the rough guide was happy with it. in 20/20 hindsight i wish I had bought that book. everyone I met that had this book was equally disappointed.

Rating :

Not the Book You Need for Japan Travel

I've used Lonely Planet Guides for my many trips abroad but the Japan Travel Guide is by far the most confusing and contains very few maps, directions, and information. I spent the majority of my time asking locals how to get to a location because the Lonely Planet guide did not provide a map or even directions for that matter. In Japan you need a map and a good one at that. You will spend the majority of your time walking the city and taking trains and you need to have a grasp of the area. This book did not provide any of that and it made me question Lonely Planet's quality and substance.

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More reviews...

Customer Review :

A good guide for traveling on-your-own.

The 8th edition is 150 pages less than the 7th. What did they cut out? Hokkaido, Tohoku, and hotels seem to be trimmed in a lot of areas. For example, Kushiro got cut to a bare mention and Onuma National Park north of Hakodate no longer made the list. If you want to see the Ainu Museum in Shiraoi, it's still in there but you're going to have to stumble across it in a box listed under "Ainu Rennaisance." I suppose Tokyo-Kyoto is what sells so if you cut, then do it far away from these two areas.

The budget hotel listing has gotten thin, and this was the main content I liked to use. Many times, the only budget accomodation listing is the Youth Hostel. Many times there are only 1 or 2 listings after the YH, but the price is high. I know there are lots more budget options, but I also know the best lists for budget lodgings are obtained at the information center in town. Why couldn't they check out some on that list and put them in the book? You're now better off checking the web before you go or waiting until you get to the info booth near the train station to get a complete list and find something that meets your budget.

I suppose some people use the restaurant listings but I can't comment. However, I usually eat at a place that's near to wherever I am at meal time. I also like the listing of the few 'gaijin' hangouts; most of the clientele are Japanese anyway.

There are complaints on the lack of information on the banking system. It's all in this edition. My guess is a reviewer got caught out after hours and got ticked off. Banks are open until 3, M-F; you're better off checking out the Post Offices which are open until 5/6 PM. ATMs close with the bank or post office. All this is in this edition, you just have to read it. I cash enough money at one time for 3-5 days worth of hotels and expenses. Credit cards won't pull you through in this country.

The maps are either small scale or generalized. They're good for getting you to a place if not around it. I've found most of the maps in both the RG and LP very similar. The Let's Go maps are a bit better due to being bilingual, but they're the same scale. It's best if you pick up a local map upon arrival. Even some of these aren't too good either, and can leave off many smaller roads and streets. If you want a good map, I've found that I have to buy the atlas-type book for the area of interest in a bookstore or a highway rest area. There are several brands, such as "Mapple," and they are arranged by 'ken' or prefecture. Some come with both romaji (western European characters) and Japanese. You just have to page through them to see what you can read. The best are only in Japanese but they are detailed down to the traffic signals.

All in all, this guide is for the individual traveler who is traveling mostly by a JR Rail Pass. It covers more places than any other guide, and in doing such doesn't have space to give a long history, photos (Eye Witness Guides), or a long history or stories about each stop. If you need the history included in the guide, look to one of the others. The Rough Guide covers fewer places but has more of the background on each place, and is popular for this reason. If the places you're going are all covered in the RG, then use that one. If you're going to Tokyo and Kyoto, you can look to the Frommers, Fodor, or Eye Witness guides which is almost all history, culture, and pictures, or just get the LP-Tokyo guide.

This guide is for practical information: finding a hotel, getting around, and getting to the places you want to see. It's not for the "drive-only" or "tour-group" individual traveller, as the former will be everywhere that not listed in any travel book, and the information for a tour type trip is thin. It's pretty good at fulfilling it's niche except for the diminished hotel listings in the budget range. Because of the thinned hotel listings, I drop a star.

Also look at: Rough Guides Japan; Let's Go Japan; Moon Guides Japan. These are all for "on-your-own" traveling.

Rating :

A great purchase

I found this guide very helpful. I travelled to Japan 10 years ago but this was a fully guided trip, and i was a school student.
This time around, my husband and I did all the planning ourselves. Lots of information, would be perfect for someone who has never travelled to Japan before.

Rating :

Strangely Annoyed

I have lots of guidebooks - and lots of Lonely Planets, for that matter. But despite the fact that they say they are for "independent travellers", I keep finding ridiculous reviews on restaurants and hotels, to the point where I've stopped using them.

The History, Snapshot, and similar sections are great, but if you have a brain of your own - use it. Forget their restaurant and hotel recommendations, as I'm not even sure they visit the places. Sometimes they have history or comments on places that is worthwhile to read, though. All tourbooks may have these drawbacks, to be fair.

Finally, I think I'm going to stop buying Lonely Planet's, though. First, they always act like driving is so scary everywhere, when it's actually quite easy to anyone with a brain. They also forget to give worthwhile tips on getting a car, etc. I imagine that this is their way of "saving the Earth". To a person who does care about the Earth, but doesn't believe that being a dirty hippie is going to save anything, this - and all their other BS trying to coerce their opinions onto you as fact - gets really freakin' old. Yes, yes, I know, LP is founded by some hippie freak from AUS or something - whooptie doo. That doesn't mean I have to pay some jerk who's going to push his politics on me, whether I agree with them or not.

Rating :

good for finding Japan's worst restaurants

I rented a car at Narita (Tokyo) and headed north on a 3-week road trip. This book has some reasonable hotel recommendations, even at the higher end of the price scale, but it is hard to understand how the authors of the book picked restaurants. At one Lonely Planet favorite I was served a soggy tuna sandwich that might have been found in England circa 1950. A place in Sapporo billed as serving "authentic Indian food" had nothing on the menu that I recognized from Indian restaurants in the U.S., England, or India. Finally the only restaurant in Japan where I managed to get food poisoning was a Lonely Planet suggestion.

Good on hotels, however, and the maps are helpful once you get into a city or region.

Rating :

Errors in this book

I always buy LP series whenever I travel to Asia and Europe. I bought a previous edition and the current edition of Lonely Planet Japan over the past 4 years. It helped me get around Japan without a problem. But for those who can't speak Japanese or can't recognize kanji, this book has serious errors that might send you to a different place. An example is that in both editions they messed up the kanji vs the English for Asakusa (historical district) and Akasaka (business district). These are completely different areas of Tokyo, you're in trouble if you're showing this to a taxi driver or someone on the street. Another example is the kanji symbol for bathroom is wrong. For someone who wants to go right away, it might take you a while to find someone who can guess what you mean if you point those kanji characters at them.

Those are just a few things that I spotted so far (i only read about tokyo, nikko, and kyoto). I also don't like the restaurant recommendations in this book. First of all, if a restaurant is in this review then most likely everyone will go there. The best about japan is that you can stroll around little alleys next to skyscrapers and will run into a neighborhood restaurant that's good and cheap. the price they listed for the so-called cheap restaurants are almost doubled the price of what I can get in a big city like Tokyo. Makes me wonder if those writers actually lived there after all.

I would still use this book in Japan to get around, it's still quite informative and entertaining to read. but for those who can't speak japanese or recognize their written characters, I suggest you bring another book with you.

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Customer Review :

Needs reformatting

This field guide has excellent sketches of birds but the layout is quite awkward. This guide like most if not all guides breaks down the birds by family groups. This works well for most areas but not Hawaii. As an example, on the first page for Crows and Honeycreepers there are six birds listed, three are extinct, the other three birds all exist on seperate islands, so if I am birding on Kauai and I look on this particular page there is only one bird I would have any chance of seeing but I still have five other birds on the page as a distraction. On the other pages there are on average 8-10 birds per page but once again some are extinct (and not boldly labled as such) while there may only be one or two birds from each island on the pages. My recommendation to make it easier to ID birds in the field would be to put all the extinct Hawai'ian endemic birds on two or more pages (since there are so many of them) for emphasis and then have seperate pages for each island. Since there are so few birds to be found on each of the Hawaiian islands versus say the tropical forests of Costa Rica, I beleive my recommended format would be much less frustrating than the current format of the book to use in the field.

Rating :

Good and complete birding book

If ou go to Hawaii and you want to go birding, I can recommend this book. It is a comprehensive guide, with clear and accurate drawings, and checklists for each island. The only thing missing is a list of buirding sites.

Rating :

Hawaii Birds

This book was just what I needed for a cruise trip around the Hawaiian Islands. Good information in this book. On a "not a birding trip" I added 26 species to my life list at Hawaii.


Rating :

The indispensible Tropical Pacific field guide.

Pratt, Bruner, and Dickinson have produced a superb field guide completely covering all the islands of the tropical Pacific from Hawai'i west through Micronesia. This is a true field guide: it gives the field marks of every species, notes problems in identification with special emphasis on distinguishing similar species, and wastes no space on matters not related to identification. (The exception is that Pratt, a significant ornithologist as well as an expert in identification, summarizes controversies in classification whre appropriate.)

The text is organized by order and family, not by region, so the flycatchers of Tahiti appear next to the flycatchers of Palau rather than near other Tahitian birds. But the illustrations are grouped by region: Samoan land birds appear together, regardless of relationships. This greatly facilitates use in the field.

The illustrations are paintings, not photographs, which allows the authors to show similar birds in identical poses as well as eliminating the accidental marks which appear in even the best photographs and can confuse the user.

The authors have chosen to include the extinct birds of the region as well as the living ones. This puts a certain amount of "deadwood" on the illustration pages, which may be detrimental. But, considering that more than one "extinct" bird has been found after being missing for nearly a hundred years, it is probably worth the minor inconvenience.

I have used the book extensively in Hawai'i and believe it to be the best guide Hawai'i's birds. I would not consider being without it anywhere in its area of coverage.

Rating :

Getting a bit dated

Still the best field guide to the birds of the tropical Pacific, Pratt's book is now over 20 years old and in need of revision. The bird life of Hawaii is in a constant state of flux, with species arriving and becoming extinct every decade. One of the most common species today, the African Silverbill, was rare when Pratt's guide was published, so is completely missing from the book. Nesting information, feeding habits, and other aspects of natural history are given very little attention. So, while the serious birder will want to own the book and carry it in the field, it is now necessary to purchase a second book to fill in all the missing information that has come to light in the last two decades. For the birder visiting Hawaii, I recommend also carrying the Hawaii Audubon Society's Hawaii's Birds. It is a lightweight supplement that includes all the new species that one is likely to encounter as well as much more information regarding the habits of each bird.

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