Wallpaper City Guide: Tokyo (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) [Paperback]

Editors of Wallpaper Magazine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2006 | Series: Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)

"Wallpaper City Guides" not only suggest where to stay, eat, and drink, but what the tourist passionate about design might want to see, whether he/she has a week or 24 hours in the city. Featured are up and coming areas, landmark buildings in an 'Architour', design centres, and the best shops to buy items unique to that city. "Wallpaper City Guides" present travellers with a fast-track ticket to the chosen location. The edited guides offer the best, most exciting, and the most beautiful of that particular city. As well as looking beautiful, the guides are expertly designed with function as a priority, and have tabbed sections so that the tourist can easily find what they are looking for. There are maps, rate and currency cards, colour-coded parts of the city, and an easy navigational tool. They are the ultimate combination of form and function.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Wallpaper* City Guides are compiled by the magazine's travel experts, both by in-house editors, and correspondents who actually live in the highlighted cities, providing up-to-the-minute information

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Phaidon Press (September 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0714846996
• ISBN-13: 978-0714846996
• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 4.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,037,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #77 in Books > Travel > Asia > Japan > Tokyo

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars WCG Tokyo's Design: Clean, Simple Lines vs. Luxe's Overstuffed Hipster Prose, November 28, 2006

By 

Sharon Langworthy "decadent minimalist" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wallpaper City Guide: Tokyo (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) (Paperback)

The Wallpaper City Guides (WCG) are not comprehensive, and there is a bit of an 'extended travel magazine article' aspect to them: however, I like WCG's differences from Luxe City Guides, the travelogues in closest competition with WCG. Luxe engages in snarky comments, and its prose (rather like a slick, smug club kid writing for middle-aged wannabee hipsters with bottomless pockets) is of a sort that I've always found grating. I tossed my Luxe Tokyo guide for this very reason.

The WCG style is meant to whet your appetite and give you some ideas about what to see if you have but a few days to check Tokyo out. I like its brevity.

The WCG gives hotel and restaurant options both expensive and reasonable, making it worthwhile for the traveller on a more modest budget, whereas Luxe covers only the most expensive places to stay, eat, etc. WCG assumes you have very good taste, and lets you decide whether or not that entails 'blowing the bank' (I made a reservation for a Tokyo ryokan based on WCG Tokyo's recommendation, as it combined style with thrift): Luxe assumes you'll be paying the $700 Mandarin Oriental or Grand Hyatt rate, and that nightclubbing and shopping is all you're interested in. WCG has attractive photos and great layout that's easy to read: Luxe has no pictures and a tiny, crammed-to-the-rafters typeface. WCG has a servicable fold-out map of the Tokyo subway system inside its back cover: Luxe has a list of taxi, limo and private car-hire companies.

The list could go on forever, but suffice it to say I like the Wallpaper City Guide Tokyo's style.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great side guide, November 4, 2007

By 

Miki S. Noguchi (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wallpaper City Guide: Tokyo (Wallpaper City Guides (Phaidon Press)) (Paperback)

I live in Tokyo and a friend of mine who recently visited brought this as her only guide book. As a stand alone guidebook, she would have been completely and totally lost without me, my Tokyo City Atlas, and my explicit step by step instructions on how to get to places without me. If you're traveling on your own or without a friend here to play guide, this book is not enough - it doesn't give you webaddresses, metro/train station stops, or the names of certain places written in Japanese so you can ask people for help.

Having said all that, as a complementary guide, this book was FANTASTIC. Every place that we went to in the book looked as good as they were pictured. Every food recommendation was truly amazing and never a waste of time. Although it does have recommendations for all around the city, I would say that it is pretty Omotesando/Minami-Aoyama centric.

I am planning to buy the new edition coming out next year for myself. This is a great book for anyone who lives in Tokyo and wants to find restaurants, museums, and temples that are perhaps off the beaten path, but on the modern architecture and interior settings path. This book generally makes no recommendations that you would see in the typical guide book (e.g. Asakusa, Shinjuku Tochomae, Kamakura day-trip), but that's fine, because if you're coming here by yourself, you will need a Lonely Planet or Frommer's anyway and those books will provide you with more comprehensive travel info.

Particular food faves in this edition: a great, Kyoto-style food izakaya across from Aoyama Gakuin, and Beige, Alain Ducasse's restaurant in the Chanel bldg in Ginza (you can get an amazing lunch set there starting at 6000 yen - a great combo of top-rate French food with impeccable Japanese service, something you can't experience in France. Definitely worth the splurge.).