Lonely Planet Tokyo City Guide [With Pullout Map]

The sheer efficiency of the density of information in this book is its most memorable trait. It distills the conventional Lonely Planet guide for Tokyo into its most essential name, address, number, category format with the same usual glossy, pretty artwork and layout. The guide takes only the best and none of the chaffe, enabling you to have the most essential and best guidance on you in a portable format. The categorization and writing style are uniquely Lonely Planet. The artwork and sheer amount of information makes this guide worth buying versus summarizing and jotting down the same yourself from the larger Tokyo guide.

Tokyo can be really overwhelming because there are a million things to do! This book really helped with highlighting each area of Tokyo as well as providing hours and addresses of the places you want to visit. It also had fantastic suggestions for cheap eats. This author takes you into the back alleys (if you want to go - which you should!) or keeps you in the high class areas of Tokyo for a well rounded trip. I coupled this book with the Tokyo City Atlas book, which made it possible to understand the crazy mapping system of Tokyo. Have fun!

"Tokyo - Citiescape" from Lonely Planet is a coffee-table book scaled to fit a vest pocket. Each of the forty or so color photographs, the kind that you wish you had the talent to have taken, targets a single aspect of the city's people, culture, or places and is accompanied by text that is appreciative and insightful. My main complaints are that the text is printed in black against blue or silver and, hence, quite difficult to read and that the photo captions, collected at the end of the book, lack sufficient detail. Make no mistake - this is not a guidebook and won't help one wit to navigate this extraordinary city. Rather, I would recommend it as reading before a first trip to prepare for the experiences ahead or after the return to evoke memories of those experiences.

Very good book. Useful info. I rediscovered Tokyo through this book. However, from the pictures you would think that the majority of young people in Tokyo were 'Coz-play-zoku', a small band of rebellious costumed youth found mainly in the Harajuku area of Tokyo. The author/photographer's fascination with these young people is obvious, but the editors definitely should have limited their exposure.

This is by far the best book I have found on Tokyo. It has everything you need to know about the city. It even has colour pictures. I highly recommend this book to any of you who are interested in or are planning to visit Tokyo.