The Rough Guide to Japan provides invaluable advice on everything from getting there (including overland routes) to tracking down the latest and best places to sleep, eat, drink and shop. There is comprehensive coverage of all the major sights – and many off the beaten track - from the northern tip of Hokkaido down to the islands of Okinawa, closer to Taiwan than Tokyo. Full-colour sections introduce manga and anime, arguably Japan’s most successful cultural export, its rich variety of festivals and its stunning traditional gardens. All this is accompanied by in-depth coverage of Japan’s history, religions, arts, movies and music plus a discussion of environmental issues. There are maps of all the main towns and tourist destinations, together with separate colour maps of the Tokyo subway system and the rail network in Osaka.
Writer and photographer, Simon Richmond honed his skills as a young journalist with the UK consumer magazine Which? before heading east to Tokyo in 1991. He spent two and a half years in Japan learning the language and working as an editor and writer for a major financial news organization on content that was drier than the Gobi, and only marginally more interesting. At the same time he travelled Japan, Asia and Australia, scribbling notes and writing travel features. All this paid off when he was hired by Rough Guides for his first gig updating peninsular Malaysia on their Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei book. Next came work on the first editions of Japan and Tokyo.
In 2000, the Rough Guide to Japan won the Travellex Travel Guidebook of the Year award. Since then Simon has written four more editions of the Japan guides the most recent published in Feb/March 2011. He's also written guidebooks to a host of other countries (Russia, South Africa, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Australia, India, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Iran) and cities (Cape Town, Sydney, Lisbon, Brussels and Antwerp), for all the major publishers including Lonely Planet, Time Out, Frommer's and Thames & Hudson.
In particular he's done a lot of adventure travel writing (a series of four books for the AA Adventure Travellers series on Australia, India, South America and Southeast Asia) and writing about food including contributions to restaurant guides to Sydney and London, including Time Out's annual London restaurant guide.
His travel features have been published in newspapers and magazines around the world, including in the UK's Independent, Guardian, Times, Daily Telegraph and Royal Geographical Society Magazine; and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Australian Financial Review Magazine and Vogue Entertaining and Travel. He's also presented a travel documentary on Japan for BBC's Radio 4.
Simon currently splits his time between bases in London, Sydney and Boston, but mainly he seems to live out of his suitcase.
