Lonely Planet Tokyo: Plan the Trip of a Lifetime | Detailed Itineraries & Maps | Insider Tips | Covers Marunouchi & Nihombashi, Ginza & Tsukiji, Shibuya & Setagaya and more (Travel Guide)

Absolutely indispensable and planning our trip to Tokyo. We used it every evening to look at areas we were going to stay during our week in Japan. Highly recommended

Well written, well organized and easy to read. Tokyo is a huge city and this book will help you find your way around.

Been a big fan of Lonely Planet guides since the 1980s and one of the great joys of getting a new L.P. guidebook in anticipation of an upcoming trip has been to sit in bed at night, crack open the book, and really get a sense of the people and the country you are about to visit. That means absorbing as much as you can both about the culture and history of your destination. You need to know this stuff **before** you leave the U.S. if you want any chance of having a meaningful conversation with a local or if you want to visit a building, memorial, landscape, or anything else and wish to truly understand what you are seeing. Past L.P. guides have been great for this, as they usually had a very detailed but condensed description of a country's history that put everything else discussed in the book into useful context. Unfortunately, the latest L.P. "Tokyo" book is almost totally silent when it comes to providing historical background. The closest that the book comes to helping the reader to understand how Japan has changed over time is an article identifying maybe 12 buildings in the city that are representative of different periods in time. Interesting, but if you don't know a little bit about what was going on in the Meiji period, in feudal Japan, during the U.S. occupation, or whatever, just knowing that something was built back then means nothing. In L.P.'s defense, the rationale is that it's not difficult in 2025 to find a well-written summary of any country's history and culture online so why take up valuable space in the book that can be better used for pretty pictures and splashy graphics? The problem with that logic is that Wikipedia, et al., talks about a lot of stuff that isn't germane to what a tourist would encounter and doesn't talk about things that they do need to know. The authors of the L.P. guide are in the best position to write that historical and cultural piece, but in this book, they did not.The other thing that irked me was the lack of more than a couple food recommendations for specific areas of the city. L.P. used to list a bunch of budget reccs, some mid-range reccs, and a small number of places where you might want to go big in each neighborhood. All were flagged on a map so you could find them with the book, and most were joints where tourists were a minority. Now there's just a few options mentioned, and curiously they tend to skew towards a Western palate (do I really care about where I can find the best cappuccino or bagel in Tokyo?). Again, the argument for only mentioning a couple examples is that there are plenty of websites out there describing Tokyo restaurants in excruciating detail and in vast numbers. Problem is that I have no idea whether the people who run those websites really know what they are talking about (there's a lot of copying and pasting going on out there) or whether their recommendations are unbiased. That's what I'm paying L.P. for: the knowledge that the suggestion was actually visited by an author without compensation. And don't just give me one or two choices...restaurants go out of business, are closed when you are there, offer something that you like but I wouldn't, or are packed that night. I want a couple of options.OK. All of this said, the latest L.P. Tokyo guide is probably worth your purchase compared to what else is out there. But compared to prior publications, this one would be a three star. I'm giving it an extra one because of a very nifty pullout map that's included.Nick in Palm Springs

We used on our recent trip to Japan. It gave us all the information we needed.

Bought this book for my son for his trip and he carried on him and said it was very helpful.

This book was up to date, the descriptions were helpful, and it was fun to read on the plane ride over!

Great guilds always love lonely planet!

Everything you need to know is in this book for a trip to Tokyo

Goede reisgids mooi geïllustreerd .

Great size for travelling. Very informative with up to date information. Found it really useful for planning before the trip!

Ottima come ogni lonely planet

An excellent little companion for your Tokyo trip. Nice to read on the plane and compact in my bag. Very useful stuff as usual for lonely planet. Well written and easy to dip into.

When I used to walk around the city back in my junior high school days, I couldn't have even imagined the situation Tokyo is in today.“Japan may have been monocultural for most of its history, but its population is growing more diverse every year. There will be growing pains as everyone continues to adapt, but things are changing. The immigrants of the past shaped certain neighbourhoods into their own, and Tokyo may witness this happening more frequently in the future, or maybe we’ll see culture evolving into a unique local form, with Japanese society only growing in diversity and inclusion – until then, we’ll just have to wait and see.”