Knopf City Guide: Tokyo

Rating:
Summary: What a terrible guide!
Review: Arrived in Tokyo with this guidebook and quickly realized I would be better off without it. The printing I have (2001) is not only hard to read and follow, but there are multiple misprints and incorrect page references. The big selling point of the book is the ability to correlate hotels, restaurants, attractions and nightspots based on page references. Many of these were wrong. The references for Tokyo bay restaurants send you to the page with Ginza hotels! Spend more time seeing Tokyo and less time staring at this book. My copy is sitting in a trash can in Tokyo. I recommend any other guidebook!

Rating:
Summary: A Clever But Ineffective Travel Guide
Review: The (very small) photographs of the sights in this Knopf City Guide are charming and inviting, but you had better get yourself another guide to Tokyo if you want to be able to locate any of the actual places. A good tourist guide equals superior maps. The idea of printing maps on silver backgrounds, as they are in this book, was ill advised to say the least. The maps are almost illegible in most lights and the print is so small that a magnifying glass is needed if you don't have near perfect eyesight. I collect travel guides, so I don't mind owning this good looking one, however, if you really need to actually travel in Tokyo I recommend "Lonely Planet Tokyo" and "Tokyo City Atlas: A Bilingual Guide". They are much more useful and traveler friendly. In a city as complicated as Tokyo, every little bit helps.