Customer Reviews

Wallpaper City Guide: Kyoto (Wallpaper City Guides)

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The review by M. Faiman picks up all the reasons this book is great. It's the first book that looks at Kyoto as it really is - a city that's steeped in history, but with a really vibrant, exciting present. Take another guidebook if you want to tour the temples, but take this guidebook too, and you'll find all the hottest, most interesting parts of a city that isn't as stuck in the past as most guidebooks would have you believe. Whichever book you buy, get this one as a companion.

I purchased this at the last minute due to the Loney Planet Kyoto guide was changing editions & I couldn't get a copy.

This book did provide some interesting places to go if you are into mostly modern architecture, and it did have some great pictures. Otherwise it was a waste if you wanted more general information. It's written in a "You can only hope to be as cool as us in finding these spots" tone and the recommendations on hotels & dining were all on the uber-tendy side.

The map included in the book was very poor, and none of the sites mentioned in the book were called out on the map (due to the lack of detail) And if you have ever had to deal with addresses in Japan, they are very complex- that's why GPS units are such a big seller there, so it made it very difficult to use.

Plus there appeared to be no flow or grouping to the locations, so if you tried to track things down on the fly, you were going back & forth across the town. After a while I gave up on the book & used a great free map the hotel gave me that was published by the Kyoto City Tourist Association. You can also get a copy of it on the second floor of the JR station at their info center.

Use this book only as a supplement to a better book to find interesting architectural sites.