Lonely Planet Kyoto (City Guide)

 (19 customer reviews)

I'm writing this from Kyoto, where I had hoped to use this book to help me get around and find places to eat and shop. Its so poorly organized that the maps are unusable. If I go to a district, I want to be able to find shops, restaurants, andplaces to visit easily. I can't do that with this book. They are indexed on the map, but do not appear together in the text. Also, I think there must be places listed on the maps (with no explanation) that are no where else in the book. Many of the restaurants listed are also unfindable, perhaps because they have gone out of business. This is not my first time in Kyoto, and I know the layout of the city fairly well. If I had to rely completely on this book, I would be very unhappy. This book has not been helpful in leading me to specific places at all. The general information about Kyoto is ok, but I wanted helpful suggestions for getting around. Thus, well indexed maps are indispensible and this book's maps are cumbersome to say the least. Also...Read more

Lonely Planet fills a niche by being a good source of information you are not likely to find in other guides, like the funky and the inexpensive, but really I wish they would make their guides more user friendly.For one the maps are extremely frustrating to use. The information on them is numbered, and the keys are either on the page before or the page after the map, so you constantly find yourself looking at the wrong key. The info would fit on the maps themselves, but they chose to use keys without taking full advantage of them by not including the page number of each item's description. Also each map points in a different direction and is a different scale from the others, very confusing.I also found the index to be lacking some very obvious entries, I don't remember specific examples but I do remember being puzzled by the index on several occasions. By the end of my trip I had corrected many of these problems by penciling them in, I suggest you do this on the airplane so you...Read more

I used this book along with three others on a recent trip to Kyoto. Some of the negative criticisms of earlier reviewers seem to have been corrected, though not entirely. But no other general guide (with a Kyoto section as part of a Japan guide) was more useful. I have some criticisms, but it is a useful guide.

Maps could have been more detailed (as well as descriptions of where things were). Restaurants were shown on maps but, at best, within a block or two of where they were. Addresses for restaurants were given (doubtless accurate using Kyoto address standards) but don't describe the exact street each is on. For example, we went to Ichi-Ban (a yakitori restaurant in the Gion district) which was merely described as "3 minutes" from the "Sanjo Keihan" subway stop. The map in the book suggested it was on Sanjo-dori ("dori" means street or avenue) but the address didn't say so. The book also said it had "a" red lantern out in front (which is used by yakitori or grill...Read more