Travel Guides: On How Westerns and Japanese Travel
Few weeks from vacations in Italy, I have started looking for a travel companion to a lone and poor student: a Travel Guide. In spite of the many options, it looks like the way Westerns (like me) travel is far different than the Japanese’s.
The ideal of tourism for most Western seems to be close to “enjoying a tourist spot by living within it for a short period of time”, thus, getting in touch with a not directly experienced society. They try to interact as much as possible with the local population and prioritize the unexpected over the scheduled plan. The idea the Japanese have about traveling is quite the opposite. They look for a catalogue, as if they were going to experience a show. They do not engage or try contact to the visited spot. And they are much more strict when it comes to scheduling. Consequently, planning the trip for both types of travelers differs a lot. Specially, when it comes to Travel Guides.
Even though I tend to stay with the Western way of discovering an unknown place, I must argue that the Japanese write much better Travel Guides.
Lonely Planet writes travel guides to budget travelers. It is full of information about cheap hostels and restaurants, maps and printed in Bible-paper. Fine. But still most budget travelers nowadays have access to the internet and are quite well informed to book the places they are spending the night (mostly available in English, even your destination is, say, Japan!). Michelin/Frommers, on the other hand, sticks to the Gourmet kind of guy: enriched with information about nice places to eat and maps for those who are willing to rent a car. Therefore, not much the student-like kind of guy. At last, I have tried National Geographic and DK Eyewitness travel guides as well. They are very nice for those looking for information about the spots themselves, rather than where to eat or stay. There are lots of (very nice) pictures and explanations about the historical or scientific relevance of the places you are paying to visit. The shortcoming, though, is that both are not very practical: they are heavy, map-less and (argh!) expensive.
These are the travel guides one can find here in Japan, be it in book stores or through Amazon Japan. But if you take a look at any book store in the next corner, you will notice that, beside these English guides, there are shelves and shelves of travel guides published in Japan.
The Japanese are very meticulous. They plan every step of their trip, from getting the Visa, stepping into and out of the airports, walking paths, hotels, restaurants and, most important, shops. Given this, most pages in a Lonely Planet kind of guide are completely unnecessary. Thus, their Travel Guides must give the reader a broad view of these issues, rather than a complete ranking of every restaurant and hotel available in Italy! You do not need 10 hotels in Tokyo. You are staying in only one. And roughly every hotel in Tokyo has a website (in English) and reservation service. If you are spending two thousand dollars in a trip to Tokyo, you ought to get it (well) planned before you step in the next airport. Thus, the 10 pages of hotel addresses in Lonely Planet would weights much less. I have no idea if this is a technological constraint (that is, the cost of such a light paper), but Japanese Guide Books are printed in a much heavier, plastic and colorful paper.Some of them are even updated seasonally: there are guides for Beijing in the autumn and spring. In both of them, the editor discourages trips to Beijing neither summer or winter. In spite of all these advantages, the average price of these Japanese guides rarely surpasses 10 to 15 dollars. Besides, if you are staying two weeks in a country, you won't have time to visit, say 10 different cities. If you are spending 10 days in Italy, you won't have time to visit, say, Verona. More ten useless pages for each non-visited city in Western-like guide books.
And that is why the Japanese guide books are so much better (in a practical sense) than most best selling English travel guides. The drawback, obviously, is that they are all written in Japanese! But hope for them not to start translating these books to English. Lonely Planet will never sell a single Bible of theirs. Meanwhile, I am going to Italy with DK Eyewitness and some spare maps!
The ideal of tourism for most Western seems to be close to “enjoying a tourist spot by living within it for a short period of time”, thus, getting in touch with a not directly experienced society. They try to interact as much as possible with the local population and prioritize the unexpected over the scheduled plan. The idea the Japanese have about traveling is quite the opposite. They look for a catalogue, as if they were going to experience a show. They do not engage or try contact to the visited spot. And they are much more strict when it comes to scheduling. Consequently, planning the trip for both types of travelers differs a lot. Specially, when it comes to Travel Guides.
Even though I tend to stay with the Western way of discovering an unknown place, I must argue that the Japanese write much better Travel Guides.
Lonely Planet writes travel guides to budget travelers. It is full of information about cheap hostels and restaurants, maps and printed in Bible-paper. Fine. But still most budget travelers nowadays have access to the internet and are quite well informed to book the places they are spending the night (mostly available in English, even your destination is, say, Japan!). Michelin/Frommers, on the other hand, sticks to the Gourmet kind of guy: enriched with information about nice places to eat and maps for those who are willing to rent a car. Therefore, not much the student-like kind of guy. At last, I have tried National Geographic and DK Eyewitness travel guides as well. They are very nice for those looking for information about the spots themselves, rather than where to eat or stay. There are lots of (very nice) pictures and explanations about the historical or scientific relevance of the places you are paying to visit. The shortcoming, though, is that both are not very practical: they are heavy, map-less and (argh!) expensive.
These are the travel guides one can find here in Japan, be it in book stores or through Amazon Japan. But if you take a look at any book store in the next corner, you will notice that, beside these English guides, there are shelves and shelves of travel guides published in Japan.
The Japanese are very meticulous. They plan every step of their trip, from getting the Visa, stepping into and out of the airports, walking paths, hotels, restaurants and, most important, shops. Given this, most pages in a Lonely Planet kind of guide are completely unnecessary. Thus, their Travel Guides must give the reader a broad view of these issues, rather than a complete ranking of every restaurant and hotel available in Italy! You do not need 10 hotels in Tokyo. You are staying in only one. And roughly every hotel in Tokyo has a website (in English) and reservation service. If you are spending two thousand dollars in a trip to Tokyo, you ought to get it (well) planned before you step in the next airport. Thus, the 10 pages of hotel addresses in Lonely Planet would weights much less. I have no idea if this is a technological constraint (that is, the cost of such a light paper), but Japanese Guide Books are printed in a much heavier, plastic and colorful paper.Some of them are even updated seasonally: there are guides for Beijing in the autumn and spring. In both of them, the editor discourages trips to Beijing neither summer or winter. In spite of all these advantages, the average price of these Japanese guides rarely surpasses 10 to 15 dollars. Besides, if you are staying two weeks in a country, you won't have time to visit, say 10 different cities. If you are spending 10 days in Italy, you won't have time to visit, say, Verona. More ten useless pages for each non-visited city in Western-like guide books.
And that is why the Japanese guide books are so much better (in a practical sense) than most best selling English travel guides. The drawback, obviously, is that they are all written in Japanese! But hope for them not to start translating these books to English. Lonely Planet will never sell a single Bible of theirs. Meanwhile, I am going to Italy with DK Eyewitness and some spare maps!
posted by fmgoto at 1:01 AM
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