Although my travels had taken me to Asia numerous times, Japan eluded me until my teen daughter and I spent three weeks there following the country’s re-opening from covid. The trip exceeded all of our expectations, but facing the country’s impenetrable language and complex transportation system felt intimidating. To prepare, I devoured a shelf full of guidebooks. I learned that each has its strengths and weaknesses, but these books and our own adventures greatly informed my decision to write First-Time Japan. I was especially fortunate to collaborate with Japan tour guide Roy Ozaki, who contributed greatly to the book and gave me essential insights into Japan’s people, places, and culture.
Even though the author remains conspicuously unidentified in this book, I found the tale of her and her husband’s two-week trip oddly intriguing.
This was the first book I read ahead of my own Japan adventure, and it attempts to be both a travel log and recommendation guide. While the recommendations seem a bit limited, I enjoyed reading about the author’s specific adventures and it definitely gave me some ideas about what my daughter and I might like to do in Japan.
It won’t replace any of the above books, but is a nice additional option if you have the time and inclination.
Are you thinking about traveling to Japan? Discover Japan through this easy to follow guide tailored for first-time travelers!
Most available online resources contain too much information! If you've searched for a Japan travel guide online, you may have noticed:
- Most guides contain disorganized information that may leave you with more questions than answers. - It is impossible to find practical information like how much a trip to Japan would cost, where to stay, and what transportation to use.
14 Days in Japan is the ultimate travel guide tailored for a first‑time traveler. It provides detailed information about visiting…
I am a comparative urban specialist who came to Japanese urban history through my aspiration to place Russian urban studies within a comparative context. Several Japanese and Western Japan specialists encouraged me to advance this exploration by examining capitalist industrial urbanization in Japan. Historians and political scientists -- particularly at Kyoto National University -- provided a platform for me to expand my engagement with Japanese urbanization; relations which have continued for some three decades. More recently, I included Kabuki in The Muse of Urban Delirium, a collection of essays that seeks answers to the challenges of urban diversity, conflict, and creativity using various performing arts – opera, dance, theater, music – as windows onto urban life.
Only an organization with the deep pockets of UNESCO could have supported and produced this magnificent historical atlas of Kyoto, covering more than 15 centuries of urban development through comprehensive data connected to stunning and informative maps analyzed by two dozen leading historians, urbanists, architects, and cartographers. As site to more UNESCO World Heritage Sites than almost any other city, Kyoto has drawn UNESCO engagement across several decades. This volume captured that work at the beginning of the twenty-first century through essays arranged chronologically drawing on the built environment to trace Kyoto’s physical, economic, cultural, and political evolution. The spectacular maps tell the story even for those readers who struggle with the French text.
Dès sa fondation au ville siècle, la ville de Kyôto a été l'une des plus vastes capitales mondiales, surpassant en taille et en magnificence les villes de l'Europe médiévale. Exception superbe dans un pays essentiellement rural, la ville est restée le foyer de la civilisation japonaise pendant près de mille ans. Unique grande agglomération japonaise à avoir été épargnée par les bombardements de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Kyôto est aujourd'hui une métropole d'un million quatre cent mille habitants qui a conservé d'innombrables vestiges de son prestigieux passé. On y recense près de deux mille lieux de culte, temples bouddhiques et…
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
Perhaps it's because I’ve lived in Fukui and have been to Echizen where the famous bamboo dolls are made that I found this novel so compelling. The novel’s uniqueness comes partly from its focus on a character who makes traditional bamboo dolls produced close to where I now live in Kanazawa, an hour north of Echizen, and part from the style of storytelling, which might be described as sparse but richly imagistic, and evocative of an all-but-lost past. The novel can easily be viewed as a modern folk tale, and moments unfold in the rural setting of 1920s Fukui that border on the mysterious-if-not-quite-supernatural. The relationship between the doll-maker and his wife is indeed strange, yet much can be extrapolated beyond that strangeness through all that’s left unsaid and un-acted on.
The Temple of the Wild Geese, a semi-autobiographical account of Mizukami's childhood, tells the tale of Jinen, a Buddhist monk raised by villagers after his mother, a beggar, abandoned him. Sent to live at a temple at the age of ten, his resentment smolders for years until it explodes in a shocking climax. In Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, no woman is willing to marry the diminutive Kisuke, a bamboo artisan, until Tamae, a prostitute, comes to pay her respects at the grave of Kisuke's father. In Tamae, Kisuke sees shadows of his own mother, who died when he was young,…
Kyoto is one of the world’s great cities. I first came here in 1994, its 1200th anniversary, and was entranced by its many treasures. In the city’s river basin were fostered the traditional arts and crafts of Japan. This is the city of Zen, Noh, the tea ceremony, geisha, moss and rock gardens, not to mention the aristocratic aesthetes of the Heian Era. Here in the ancient capital are imperial estates and no fewer than 17 World Heritage sites, including the Golden Pavilion and the divine Byodo-in. Faced with this wealth of wonders, I tried to weave them into a coherent story – the story of a most remarkable city.
This was my introduction to the major sights of Kyoto. As well as providing essential information, there is an extra section suggesting how to value each sight on a deeper level. It helped me appreciate just how special Kyoto is. That it has stayed in print for so long is testimony to its worth.
This Kyoto travel guide presents the best tourists sites in Japan's spiritual and historical capital.
With this guide the visitor needs no further assistance to learn all that a place has to offer. It is factual, concise, and complete. This Japan travel book is generously illustrated with photographs, maps, route plans, and building plans, as well as a selection of reproductions from old prints and picture scrolls.
The sights were specifically chosen to give foreign visitors a broad understanding of Kyoto's political, religious, and cultural history. Among them are the ancient Phoenix Hall of the Byodo-in, the famous rock garden…
Between 2004 and 2020, I made twenty-five road trips around Japan’s four main islands, covering over thirty thousand miles, mainly in a rental car with my partner Karen. We traced the 1689 journey of the poet Bashō to northeastern Honshū and searched for famous places depicted in woodblock prints of nineteenth-century artist Utamaro Hiroshige. My recommendations include the books I consulted to explore roads less traveled and sites less frequented to learn about the literature, history, and culture of our ancestral homeland. The road trips are documented in my featured book and online at my website.
Jansen’s book reproduces woodblock prints from Hiroshige’sCollection of Prints of Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces(1853–1856), which features a print of a famous place from each of the sixty-eight provinces of Old Japan, plus a print of Edo. When I looked through the prints in 2018, some of the places, were familiar to me; others, I had never heard of. I realized we had visited about a third of the places, so I set out to see the rest. The sites, of course, look different from the prints, but navigating backroads to visit them was always interesting. Among the most memorable places we visited were Hōrai Temple, Monkey Bridge, Yōrō Waterfall, Mt. Haruna Shrine, Kanegasaka, Waterfall Bay, Gōkei Gorge, Gokansho, and the Kannon Hall at Abuto.
Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858) designed a series of 70 landscapes depicting the provinces of Japan between 1854 and 1856. It was the first of a number of sets from the highly productive years of his later life. The designs comprising Famous places in the 60-odd provinces (Rokuju yoshu meisho zue) are taken from all corners of Japan. Designs published before this series had already depicted the famous routes between Edo and Kyoto, the Tokaido and the Kisokaido, and various well known locations such as the famous waterfalls, Lake Omi and the Jewel Rivers, but a series on such a grand scale…
Kyoto is one of the world’s great cities. I first came here in 1994, its 1200th anniversary, and was entranced by its many treasures. In the city’s river basin were fostered the traditional arts and crafts of Japan. This is the city of Zen, Noh, the tea ceremony, geisha, moss and rock gardens, not to mention the aristocratic aesthetes of the Heian Era. Here in the ancient capital are imperial estates and no fewer than 17 World Heritage sites, including the Golden Pavilion and the divine Byodo-in. Faced with this wealth of wonders, I tried to weave them into a coherent story – the story of a most remarkable city.
Still today Kyoto is haunted by the magic of its Heian past (794-1185), when an aristocratic elite indulged in aesthetic pursuits, particularly poetry writing. Without an understanding of the period, it is impossible to understand modern Kyoto. The classic work is The Tale of Genji, but it is too heavy a tome to carry around, so the much slimmer and more accessible Pillow Book isrecommended. I loved the Willdean wit, the sharp observations, and the intriguing lists. I’m sure you will too, for unlike Genji it has not dated.
In the tenth century, Japan was both physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. The Pillow Book recaptures this lost world with the diary of a young court lady. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the well-known novel The Tale of Genji. Unlike the latter's fictionalized view of the Heian-era court, Shōnagon's journal provides a lively miscellany of anecdotes, observations, and gossip, intended to be read in juicy bits and pieces. This unique volume was first rendered into English in 1889. In 1928, Arthur Waley, a seminal figure in the Western studies of…
Although my travels had taken me to Asia numerous times, Japan eluded me until my teen daughter and I spent three weeks there following the country’s re-opening from covid. The trip exceeded all of our expectations, but facing the country’s impenetrable language and complex transportation system felt intimidating. To prepare, I devoured a shelf full of guidebooks. I learned that each has its strengths and weaknesses, but these books and our own adventures greatly informed my decision to write First-Time Japan. I was especially fortunate to collaborate with Japan tour guide Roy Ozaki, who contributed greatly to the book and gave me essential insights into Japan’s people, places, and culture.
Lonely Planet guidebooks are almost always the first guides I buy when traveling to a new country.
I read through one almost as if I am reading a novel, taking notes about the places I want to visit and things I’d like to do. That said, the books can be overwhelming simply because they attempt to do so much.
The densely-packed design also doesn’t succeed as well as Fodor’s Essential Japan. Especially if this is your first trip, this is an excellent additional resource—but again, because of its weight you will probably want to leave it at home and take a lighter reference on your actual trip.
For booking hotels and finding transportation details, you’ll probably do better using more up-to-date and extensive internet resources.
Lonely Planet's Japan is your passport to the most relevant, up-to-date advice on what to see and skip, and what hidden discoveries await you. Explore over a thousand temples in old imperial capital Kyoto, relax in one of the onsens scattered across the archipelago, and sample the breadth of Japan's sublime cuisine; all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Japan and begin your journey now!
Inside Lonely Planet's Japan Travel Guide:
Up-to-date information - all businesses were rechecked before publication to ensure they are still open after 2020's COVID-19 outbreak
I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan, and my new novel, Beautiful Shining People, is a direct result of two profound experiences I had there. The first was when I was hiking through the hills of Kyoto late one night and turned around to see a glowing creature–some have said they think I saw a kami. The second experience happened when I was in Hiroshima at the Peace Park. I immediately started crying, seeing all the schoolchildren learning about the horrible atrocity committed against their ancestors. I have no idea why it affected me so much, but it was one of the most moving experiences of my life.
Memoirs of a Geishais the only book I’ve actually dreamed about while reading – that’s how much it gripped me.
Not only are the characters richly drawn, the cultural details and world of pre-war Japan are so immersive you’ll feel like you are walking the streets of the Kyoto of almost a century ago. This book also fascinates me because it is the only one Arthur Golden ever wrote.
I don’t know why he never wrote again, but how could he top it? It’s the perfect novel.
'An epic tale and a brutal evocation of a disappearing world' The Times
A young peasant girl is sold as servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. Many years later she tells her story from a hotel in New York, opening a window into an extraordinary half-hidden world of eroticism and enchantment, exploitation and degradation and summoning up a quarter of a century of Japan's dramatic history.
'Intimate and brutal, written in cool, lucid prose it is a novel whose psychological empathy and historical truths are outstanding' Mail on Sunday
I have been studying Japanese since 2008, studied in the country twice, and then finally made my home here in 2011. Over the years, I have been to 43 of Japan’s 47 prefectures, writing articles about my experiences and constantly searching for new, hidden places where I could still find a touch of the Japan of yore. With so many people visiting the country, I want to do my part to give folks options that are off the beaten path and away from the crowds.
The actual story as told by an actual geisha (rather than the male author of Memoirs of a Geisha), I was absolutely obsessed with this book when I began studying Japanese.
I loved the depictions of Kyoto pre-war and all the festivals, ceremonies, and intricacies that go into the life of a geisha. The post-retirement part of the story is also so real and human, and while it is a much quieter book compared to the sturm and drang of Memoirs of a Geisha, it has a delicate beauty that stuck with me.
GEISHA, A LIFE "No woman in the three-hundred-year history of the karyukai has ever come forward in public to tell her story. We have been constrained by unwritten rules not to do so, by the robes of tradition and by the sanctity of our exclusive calling...But I feel it is time to speak out." Celebrated as the most successful geisha of her generation, Mineko Iwasaki was only five years old when she left her parents' home for the world of the geisha. For the next twenty-five years, she would live a life filled with extraordinary professional demands and rich rewards.…
My book recommendations reflect an abiding passion for Japanese literature, which has unquestionably influenced my own writing. My latest literary interest involves Japanese poetry—I’ve recently started a project that combines haiku and prose narration to describe my experiences as a part-time resident in a 1300-year-old Japanese hot spring town that Bashō helped make famous in The Narrow Road to the Deep North. But as a writer, my main focus remains novels. In late 2023 the second in a planned series of novels set in Ishikawa prefecture will be published. I currently live in Kanazawa, but have also been lucky to call Sapporo, Akita, Tokyo, and Fukui home at different times.
While the movie is admittedly a stunning achievement in cinema, the novel from which it is adapted surpasses it for the depths it plunges readers into the characters’ surreal and claustrophobic experiences and the life of the village in Tottori prefecture in which the story plays out. Truly frightening at times, the novel is of the legitimate can’t-put-down category and will stay with you long after you finish it. In my case it’s been 30 years! Kōbō Abe is a famous and influential Japanese writer, with many novels translated into English, but in my opinion this one is far and away his best.
The Woman in the Dunes, by celebrated writer and thinker Kobo Abe, combines the essence of myth, suspense and the existential novel.
After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd…
