Lonely Planet Tokyo (Paperback)

~ John Ashburne (Author), Chris Rowthorn (Author) "When the first European visitors Portuguese traders came to Japan in the 16th century, Tokyo was an unlikely destination..." (more)
Key Phrases: open dawn till dusk, blossom viewing, boxed text, Getting There, Tokyo Bay, Hong Kong (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Details on accommodation, restaurant and entertainment options for all budgets and interests, local excursions, from climbing Mount Fuji to the shrines of Nikko are included in this text. Information on getting around quickly and easily, is also included, as are walking tours.

Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: Lonely Planet Publications; 4 edition (September 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1740590597
• ISBN-13: 978-1740590594
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,714,043 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good basic guide, but missing some key information., June 10, 2003

By	E. Kraemer (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lonely Planet Tokyo (Condensed Edition) (Paperback)

I bought the condensed guide because it was small, fit easily in my bag, and seemed to have enough information to keep me going for a short trip to Tokyo. Once I got there, I discovered good and bad about this book.

Good:
- Excellent overview of the city, the major sites, and good itineraries for short stays.
- Helpful maps of the city and subway systems.
- Great cross-referencing between the maps and the guide.

Bad:
- Restaurant listings in the book were all in English with no Japanese spelling for the names. At least in the neighborhoods we were visiting, there were no romanized signs for the restaurants, so we were completely incapable of finding any of the restaurants listed in the book. Although we cannot read Japanese, we are capable of doing symbol comparison, that would have been very handy. We ended up buying a second guide to help us find restaurants.
- No maps of the JR lines in Tokyo. We ended up picking one up at the train station.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Good information, poorly organised!, April 16, 2002

By	Dianne "gypsie" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Lonely Planet fills a niche by being a good source of information you are not likely to find in other guides, like the off-beat and the inexpensive. But really I wish they would make their guides more user friendly and be more diligent about updating their material.

The maps in this guide are extremely frustrating to use. You have to flip back and forth between the map and the key, which is located either before or after the map. The key does not include the page number of the description, so you also have to flip to the index which often does not include what you are looking for. I also had the Time Out Tokyo guide with me and I quickly decided that I prefered it over Lonely Planet Tokyo. I found the two to be very similar in content but Time Out is better organised and the maps are excellent.

The Lonely Planet guides have the irritating habit of inserting special chapters in the middle of regular chapters. Sometimes you don't realise there is more information on subject you are reading, you are expected to look past the special chapter.

Because you have much better choices for Tokyo, I highly recommend "TokyoQ" and "Little Adventures", my recommendation would be to not bother with this one.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A disappointment, December 16, 2003

By A Customer

We went to Japan for vacation in October 2003 and LP Tokyo was all we took with us. For the past 7 years I purchased at least 7 Lonely Planet books and they all served me well when visiting interesting parts of the world. Even though I studied 2 years of Japanese in college (ie, I can convert the book's English letters into Japanese characters when looking for places) and this was my third visit (ie, already know what to expect), I still find it confusing in Tokyo since it lacked useful information, and the only thing I used is probably the subway map. Two things that bothered me the most:

1) lack of truly useful phrases in the back section. Ok I know there's actually a Japanese phrase book sold separately, but how could this book has Japanese translation for I'm "Epileptic", but does not have a useful phrase like "please (do/don't) wrap this for me", which is a whole lot useful as Japanese merchants tend to wrap your purchases with beautiful paper, many times they asked me whether I'd like to have it wrapped, thankfully I remembered my textbook days.
2) it is obvious to me that the writers didn't go to all the good restaurants. Maybe this happens to all restaurants (ie, as soon as a travel book mention a restaurant as a good one, everyone would try it out and therefore the restaurant achieves complacency. I tried restaurants listed in the book that actually turned out to be mediocre. And we stopped by some restaurants in alleys that's cheap and tasty. I know it's impossible to hit all restaurants, but how could the writer say that Nikko is a "gourmet blackhole"? Has he/she even walked down the main street to try out the few restaurants that were there? We shyed away from touristy restaurants near the train/bus station in Nikko and walked further up the mainstreet, and we were rewarded with the most memorable dining of our trip, and great food at a meager price. The restaurant owner's family offered us fresh persimmons that were in season to take home, corrected my Japanese grammar(sounds critical but it was actually funny the way they did it), showed us the correct way of eating the food we ordered, and chatted with us about our trip. All I could say is that we were lucky to bump into that place, and anyone could easily do that since it's right on the main street.

Enough about the negative side. I would still buy another Lonely Planet just because I had been a loyal reader and the series had given me countless great memories exotic places even the locals rarely visit. But I just can't give LP credit for its Tokyo book this time(I bought a LP Japan book in 2001 and it was also mediocre). It still has useful information for first time visitors such as the culture, food, getting around by train, and the fact it warns you to avoid Tokyo tower, etc. But when it comes to dining, forget about scrutnizing a street map to find the restaurant addrss listed in the book, you're no further than 100 meters from the nearest restaurant if you're in Tokyo. Usually those restaurants in alleys away from mainstreet (and tourist areas).