Product Description

They don't come any cooler than Tokyo. By turns hi-tech, lo-fi, conventional and outrageous, Tokyo is a city that shouldn't work but does. Promenade with the goths of Harajuku, feast your eyes on the blazing lights of Ginza, and unwind in an intimate izakaya. For a city as stylish as Tokyo, you need a smart and streetwise guide. This is it.

• INDULGE YOUR APPETITE in the finest local restaurants with our Japanese food chapter

• CATCH THE BULLET TRAIN with confidence, with 11 detailed color maps, and routes and prices from Akihabara to Ueno Zoo

• DO THE SHINTO SHUFFLE with walking tours to temples and shrines, gardens and palaces

• PICK UP THE PULSE of the city with our entertainment listings and City Life chapter

• REFRESH YOUR SENSES with easy day-trips to onsen, temple towns and the famed Mt Fuji

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #241916 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 274 pages

Review
"...Encounter guides...discreet in size, but generous enough on page count to provide a fuller city experience minus the hefty guidebook load." -- Sherman's Travel, April 2007

Sherman's Travel, April 2007
'...Encounter guides...discreet in size, but generous enough on page count to provide a fuller city experience minus the hefty guidebook load.'

From the Publisher
Introducing Tokyo

When you first step off the Yamanote Line, you'll find a tangle of sounds and stars and telephone wires. Iridescent tiles on a nearby building will glisten, and bells and whistles will filter through the din of the crowd as the automatic sliding doors of a pachinko parlour half a block away open and close intermittently.

If it's morning, which it probably is if jetlag nudged you awake with the birds, you'll be swarmed on all sides by some of the 20 million people who are on their way to somewhere - quickly, quickly. They will be from one of Tokyo's 23 wards or from suburbs that are featureless or beautiful. They will be bank presidents or janitors or children in school uniforms. They will be patient but a little tired, knowing that come evening they will retrace their steps and reverse their routes - if you happened to be standing in the same spot, you'd be moved back onto the train with them, swept and rolled by an incredible wave.

If you're lucky enough to spend a few more days here, you'll realize that all this madness is as predictable as a lunch bell, and that it's only the surface of this wonderful city, which has as many bars with booths and soft cushions as it does karaoke machines. This is Tokyo's exquisite complexity - a horn in your ear and a hand on your shoulder, the knowledge that you can, if you choose, be alone in any crowd, but if you drop your wallet, three strangers will pick it up.

But there's no time to consider this. You're off into the city, pulled by the escalators and jostled by anonymous elbows. Tall buildings appear, each one a stack of activity marked by a sign to be read from top to bottom, a sign that may be composed of several spiny scripts and perhaps decorated with a patch of English. A few more steps and you happen upon two rust-red wooden posts separated by a few car's lengths and joined high above by a cross-beam of the same color. A neighborhood shrine in the middle of all this? You walk beneath the torii (gate to the shrine) and up to a small weathered structure where everything is quiet except for the well-fed cats who live under the wooden steps. Miraculously, in a city of millions, no-one seems to be around.

You leave and, as you go to step back onto the street, you forget to look to the right and are nearly run over by an old man riding a bicycle at breakneck speed while puffing on a cigarette. Slowing as he's just past you, he turns around to make sure you're okay, then laughs and pedals on.

This is just 20 minutes, a beginning. There are stairs up ahead on the corner, just across from the chestnut stand, that lead down to the subway. These could take you to a train that carries you back to the station where you started. Or like a magic rabbit hole, it could transport you to other neighborhoods where sumo wrestlers eat lunch or grandmothers buy rice or shops sell plastic spaghetti and sushi. And all of this says that Tokyo is about possibility, the real reason more than a quarter of Japan lives here. Though fire and earthquake and economic recession occasionally threaten the well-being of the city, there are steps up ahead, there's someplace else to go - quickly, quickly.

Customer Reviews

Better than Frommer's
I recently bought both this book and Frommer's most recent edition of its guide to Tokyo and my own conclusion is that the Lonely Planet guide is much better than its rival. Lonely Planet's is shorter, but the information presented within is much more useful--especially for my situation as a student with a place to stay and food being taken care of (though Lonely Planet does have information on hotels and restaurants for those who need to know). This guide has several things that Frommer's lacks...

1. a fairly complete section of street maps of downtown Tokyo that include all the subway lines.

2. cross-references within the book between sections on places of interest organized by geography and sections organized by topic. This enables one to look up on a museum, find its location, and then more readily look up other places of interest in the vicinity.

3. more walking tours.

4. correct romaji. I found it extremely annoying that Frommer's would be so careless as to make constant typos with important things such as place names. In one instance, the single-page reference to Tokyo's subway system--the generic schematic that can be had for free from the Tokyo govt--had "Yotsuya" station spelled as "Yetsuya," changing the pronunciation and potentially causing tourists to get lost.

5. More up-to-date. Even though both were printed at roughly the same time (both have 2004 as their year of publication), Lonely Planet has less information that is outdated. Again pointing to the subway reference in Frommer's, the page omits the new Shiodome station, currently a popular destination, even though the station opened back in 2002.

What I also liked about the Lonely Planet guide was the author's mention of the avant-garde of Tokyo for those who want to see more than just Tokyo Disneyland. I wouldn't say the Frommer's guide was a waste; I'll probably take both when I go to Japan this year, but suffice to say I do not regret making this additional purchase.

Excellent practical information, improved cultural suggestions
The Lonely Planet guides are very often the best when it comes to providing practical information such as maps, changing money, the best way to get from A to B, etc. This edition of the Tokyo guide is no exception. It has everything you need to plan your trip and to get around Tokyo.

This edition is also an improvement over the prior editions when it comes to cultural recommendations, such as restaurants, walking tours, interesting shops, museums, etc. The "Time Out" guide is probably still better is the cultural department, but it is weak when it comes to maps, etc., so it may be worth taking both guides.

boring, but incredibly useful
When we were planning our trip to Japan, we purchased The Rough Guide to Japan and The Lonely Planet Guide to Tokyo. Reading through the Lonely Planet Guide, I found very little that sounded worth doing or seeing. The same items described in The Rough Guide were much more intriguing. So I chose what to see and do based on The Rough Guide.
Close to the time of our trip, someone who had just been to Japan recommended The Time Out Guide to Tokyo for the maps. But when it came time for planning the details of the tour - where the chosen attractions were located, when they were open, and how to get from here to there, the maps and the details in the descriptions in The Lonely Planet Guide were far more useful than those in the other two books. For practical use, I have given this book four stars.