Customer Reviews

Top 10 Tokyo (Eyewitness Top 10 Travel Guides)

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This is an excellent book to walk around with in Tokyo. The book is small enough to fit easily in a woman's purse and has maps of the most touristy parts of the city. There is also a decent subway/train map, although there are so many subway/train lines in Tokyo that it can get imtimidating. Also, maps of Tokyo with English lettered street names are of limited use since the actual street signs are usually in Japanese characters only, making it difficult sometimes to walk around without getting lost.

Like the other "Top 10" travel guides, "Top 10 Tokyo" is in the format of top ten lists with related narrative and information for things like tourist sites, hotels, restaurants, etc. The list of top ten tourist sites is followed by lists of the top ten things about each site. There are also top ten lists of sites, restaurants, shopping, bars and nightlife for different sections of the city with small maps showing where each place is approximately located. There are also top ten lists for things such as "General Information," "Getting Around Tokyo," "Eating and Drinking Tips," "Tokyo on a Budget" and "Things to Avoid."

The "top ten" format is good for Tokyo because, frankly, it doesn't have all that much for a tourist to see, considering it's size. (The Emperor's Palace grounds was the highlight for me.) You've seen one Japanese garden, park, pagoda and shrine, you've seen them all, pretty much. The most interesting thing about a visit to Tokyo is just walking in the different neighborhoods and observing the people. (The Japanese people impressed me with their manners and consciousness of others.)

Was perfect for our trip to Tokyo! Everything about it was great, but we think one of the best parts about it were the maps, including the subway map. So many times it helped us find our way through the city. We looked through several quides to find the right one and I believe this one tops them all!

Top 10 - Tokyo by Eyewitness Travel, a pocket sized, ultra simplified guide for the casual traveler. Certainly a more exotic and free spirited traveler would not want to be contained by this simple format from Eyewitness Travel, would they? The set up of the Top 10 - Tokyo guide is almost childishly simple. With various sections dedicated to seven different parts of Tokyo. Inside those areas, on the each individual page, are lists of what Eyewitness Travel considers to be the top 10 restaurants, top 10 festival and events, top 10 garden and parks, top 10 pop culture venues, et cetera. By splitting prime tourist venues in these easy to read and quick reference lists, coupled with a copious amount of visually pleasing pictures of the area make Top 10 - Tokyo a perfect guide for beginner traveler or casual tourists.

This guide's purpose is oriented around one thing, the audience it is produced for. A family looking to travel abroad, a young couple's first trip outside of the United States, this guide is for people who do not have the time to examine in depth each possible destination. No way is Top 10 any competition for a thousand page guide like The Rough Guide to Japan that describes hiking trails and culture in immense detail (and is about twenty dollars more than Top 10 Tokyo). At first glance one can tell this is possibly the most simplified travel guide on the market. With very small and concise blurbs on each location, and pictures after pictures on each page, Eyewitness Travel makes their Top-10 line of guides akin to a children's book, easy to carry around and easy to read.

The pictures of the area around Tokyo are an integral part of what makes the guide work as a casual reference material. The pictures are bright and take up most of the space on each page. This results in the sacrifice of pure information, be it about history or culture or directions, and instead shows what a tourist may expect to see once they get there, and what they may be able to take a picture of and upload it to Facebook. After all, most first time travelers let their eye guide them, like a moth to a light, beginner tourists are drawn to visually appealing structures, gardens (which there seem to be plenty of in the Tokyo area), and other visually stimulating tourist sites.

Going along with the strong visual theme of Top-10-Tokyo, maps are extremely prominent on almost every page of guide. The in-page maps are detailed without being too convoluted. However, there are bigger and more detailed fold-out maps that are attached in the book. For someone who has never travelled to Tokyo before these can be very useful. There is also a guide to the subway maps on the back cover of the guide in case the traveler wants to experience a new mode of travel that is cheaper than most other transportation systems in Tokyo. While these maps may be a good starting point for amateur travelers or first time travelers to Tokyo, they are not detailed enough to only go on them alone, for only the main streets are labeled, while most side streets and more minor streets go unlabeled. Plus the size of the actual maps (because it is a pocket sized guide) is very small and hard to pinpoint where you may actually be on it. The trip would require additional maps from a source other than the Eyewitness Travel Guide, or a use of a GPS. However, for a more spontaneous traveler, a backpacker perhaps, the map may be all they need, assuming they are experienced with getting around in a massive city. For, as the travel guide states, Tokyo is the largest city in the world.

This may be why the travel guide is so inexpensive, the fact that the maps found inside of it are not quite adequate for a casual tourist (an inexperienced traveler) may need in a massive city like Tokyo. This, coupled with the fact that there is limited amount of cultural information, influence the fact that the relatively small travel guide is only approximately ten dollars. This pricing is an intelligent move by Eyewitness Travel because of the audience they are marketing their flashy travel guide to. Would a family want to waste thirty to fifty dollars on a travel guide with a confusing abundance of information? No, with a trip to a foreign country (not to mention the biggest city in the world) seeming as daunting as it is for a more inexperienced traveler, the simpler the better, which means the cheaper the better as well.

But, there is some important cultural information in Top-10 - Tokyo that may make it worth the ten dollars over a more expensive travel guide. The smartest part of this travel guide, that truly appeals to a first time traveler to Japan and Tokyo, is the section at the end entitled "Streetsmart". This section lists common things any foreigner should be aware of while traveling in Tokyo; it discusses how credit cards are not as commonly used as in America so cash should be kept on person at all times. Or how there are separate subway trains for women since sexual harassment is a large problem on the subway in Tokyo. This Streetsmart section also has more traditional Japanese values, as in when (and in what situation) to take your shoes off when entering a household or building.

Top-10 - Tokyo travel guide is a flashy, colorful, simple guide for an everyday traveler who wants to simply know where to eat and sleep. A traveler who would want to go to a more secluded, less "touristy", location would be disappointed with the set-up of Top-10 - Tokyo, for the way it is arranged the locations suggested in the guide are only popular, more stereotypical, location. But, the more inexperienced traveler may find this guide to be a stress free, easy to use, portable travel guide that could see a lot of use while preparing for the trip and while actually on the streets of Tokyo.

But, there is one more problem with the set up of Top 10 - Tokyo. That is, what is being left out? Because it is so simple in the way it labels the Top 10 in everything spanning from restaurants to clubs to gardens, it may have the traveler feeling very restricted in terms of where they want to go. And, while the author of Top 10 - Tokyo may think one restaurant is the best in Tokyo, a family with small children or a couple looking for a quiet lunch may not. But, with each destination in the Top 10 only having a small blurb explaining what it is famous for and where it is, a reader never truly gets an idea of what the place is actually like, just that apparently this author thinks it is the best in Tokyo. For example, here is the blurb from the number one restaurant in Tokyo (according to Eyewitness Travel), "Famed for its silky tofu dishes, this acclaimed restaurant has been around since the Edo period". In this sense the entire guide is a Tourist Trap since anybody who buys this guide will surely go to the destination deemed number one. With barely any information on its suggested tourist destinations and only a handful of suggestions for each category of destinations, Top 10 - Tokyo is a subpar guide for someone who wants to get the best out of Tokyo. But, if there is a traveler looking for simplicity, because it is their first trip or they have small children to keep track of, this guide would be decent if they felt like trusting the author's opinion on what the best restaurant in Tokyo is.