The first line of the book ("your complete destination guide") is incorrect. No travel guide can ever been complete and this one doesn't even cover the whole country. The book assures the reader that Japan is open for travel after the earthquake (it is - and it wants tourists), but almost nothing is mentioned about the part of Tohoku that follows the shinkansen line between Tokyo and Hachinohe, a distance of 593 kms. I suppose this explains why the book is 80 pages shorter than the 11th edition. LP has effectively imposed its own exclusion zone on eastern Tohoku, and it's far larger than the area around the Fukushima atomic energy plant. It starts just north of Tokyo and goes through Sendai, Morioka, Hiraizumi and all their surrounding areas. Nikko remains (almost as an island) presumably because it's just too important to leave out. Like Tokyo. More of the region is open to tourists than the book allows. Japan itself has been promoting Tohoku as a tourist destination. For example, hundreds of participants of Tohoku festivals were sent to South Korea to perform in Seoul Plaza on 25 September 2011. LP hasn't thought through all the implications of leaving out the Tohoku shinkansen line. It becomes inconsistent: it continues to tell JR pass holders to use the line to Utsonomiya to get to Nikko. There are other problems too. Taking a ride on a shinkansen is now a major highlight for LP. But the best shinkansen ride available to JR pass holders (the fastest train, the longest distance without a stop) is precisely the Hayate from Tokyo to Sendai and Hachinohe which runs through LP's exclusion zone. It operates fully. LP continues to recommend the JR East Pass (P426) when the main route to use it on is, again, the Tohoku shinkansen line.
One of the few improved things about the book is that most of the hype that LP put on its covers for a few years (100% updated, 100% accurate, no one knows Japan like LP etc.) has been removed. No LP guide has ever been 100% updated or 100% accurate. Typically, LP recycles large amounts of material from edition to edition (examples are given below). There's a new very dubious strapline however ("Japan is a ... cultural Galapagos"), and we're told on the cover that the guide provides "comprehensive listings". Don't believe it. We're into the 12th edition of the guide but unnecessary shortcomings and errors continue. LP's information on matsuri (cultural, traditional festivals) is the weakest aspect of the book in my view. It's not the work of experts. LP puts a lot of effort into researching restaurants and bars (a fourteen page chapter is devoted to introducing food and drink), but its coverage of matsuri is lamentable. It will require quite a lot of evidence to justify this.
Japan is one of the best countries in the world for festivals, but LP still provides neither an accurate, coherent overview of the topic as a whole, nor well-researched, well-judged descriptions of the different types or of individual ones. LP makes three attempts to introduce matsuri but each is half-hearted and fails. The first column LP is required to fill on matsuri promises details on some of the wilder festivals in the country (P25). Four are listed but, embarrassingly, only one is relevant. LP is reduced to apologising that two of the selected four are not even festivals and that a third is `pretty tame'. Naming four `wild' matsuri is very easy. LP not only fails but, after admitting its failure, does nothing about it. The column has no point. The calendar of events (P27-30), now called "month by month", is no improvement on the poor effort in the 11th edition; in some ways it's even worse. It has become a mish-mash of too many things and it doesn't get very far. A lot of generalised weather reporting has been introduced for no obvious reason. We're now told July "can be very hot and humid" (after having just been told that July "can be pretty humid" (P20)). Gosh. Blandness stands out ("several interesting festivals happen in Japan in August") and avoidable errors occur (Golden Week is not an event of interest to tourists, Obon is not a matsuri and Shogatsu pointlessly appears twice). This is the one place in the book where LP could have provided some worthwhile information on matsuri but the opportunity is missed. LP manages to name only 11 matsuri here: not even one per month. LP presents two separate lists of the country's top five festivals (P27, P248) and they only partly match. It's an impossible task anyway: LP is just filling space, apparently satisfied to appear to provide information. You might expect Japan's biggest festivals to be highlighted. They're not - many are hidden away. You have to stumble on P310 to find a mention of Osaka's Tenjin matsuri - "one of Japan's three biggest festivals". The Rough Guide makes a much more reasonable effort to introduce and characterise matsuri, even if it's not totally successful. LP makes no attempt at all.
The structure of the rest of LP's information on matsuri leaves the reader to do the work - and it's not worth the effort. Most of the book follows the well-worn path of leading the tourist from place to place around the country so most of the festivals named in the book are only listed under the relevant town's heading. Festivals are not bars or restaurants: you don't find them just by going to a place. A listing of festivals only starts to make sense if it is ordered by date. This is the approach taken by the Japanese National Tourist Office. JNTO publishes an annual list of 74 major festivals (63 more than LP in its calendar), and follows this up with monthly newsletters, compiled very seriously by a wonderful lady at the Tokyo JNTO TIC. (Aside: this office moved on 2 Jan 2012 - the address given in the guide is now out of date.) These newsletters contain many hundreds of events and provide the best available information on matsuri in English. LP doesn't mention these publications. LP does provide a long list of festivals in the index but it's an irritating, confused mess. Ordering is random: some are listed by region or town/city name (Akita Kanto), some by the Japanese name of the festival (Nebuta) and some by generic terms both partly-relevant and irrelevant (ice, beer ...). Some are missed in error (Ningen Shogi in Tendo, P448), but entries only point to text that is hardly ever worth reading. Much better information can be found elsewhere for free.
LP leaves out major festivals. Sanno, Kanda, Fukagawa Hachiman, Chichibu Yomatsuri all appear in lists of important matsuri but are all ignored by the guide. Very poor lists appear under Tokyo and Kyoto. None are listed under Yokohama or Matsuyama. More significantly however, only festivals that take place in a town or city individually described in the book stand any chance of even being named. This is a significant weakness as many wonderful festivals in Japan take place in very ordinary towns of otherwise no interest to tourists (Omihachiman, Hachinohe, Gamagori, Omagari ...). The Rough Guide has recognised the Kounomiya shrine hadaka matsuri in Inazawa as a world-class event. It is. The BBC, LP's current owner, has even made a documentary there (though, like LP, it was more concerned with eating). This festival will probably never appear in the guide as it doesn't fit the template. This is just wrong. Small towns blaze into life on festival days. Their festivals almost invariably have significant advantages over the enormous ones in major cities: fewer people, less security, less restriction of movement and the opportunity to get closer and more involved.
LP's descriptions of the matsuri it does name are too cursory to be of use and are far too often misleading. LP rarely provides details that convince me that its researchers have actually been. Food and drink are treated with reverence and in great detail but none of LP's "travel experts" seems interested in matsuri. LP provides prices of beer and food but never tells us when you have to pay to see a festival or how hard it is to get a ticket. It tells us the opening and closing times of bars but doesn't tell us the start and finishing times of matsuri (Aomori Nebuta on P427 is a rare exception). Too often, LP simply resorts to the standard JNTO/tourist office line, vague generalities and an inconsequential word or two. The points that I would expect to be included in a travel guide are too frequently missed. Thus, following JNTO, Takayama spring matsuri is `one of Japan's greatest festivals' (P191). (The April event is now listed as one of the five `top events' in the country though the repeat in October isn't mentioned until P191.) Takayama does attract a great number of foreign tourists, but it's actually very mild and far less interesting and exciting than Hida-Furukawa hadaka matsuri which takes place a few miles away a couple of days later. The description of this latter festival (P195) still misses the main points and remains too reliant on the same lame joke carried forward from the guide's two previous editions at least. The continued use of the word `stage' remains misleading. The Rough Guide does a better job. Again following JNTO, the Nagoya matsuri is described as the city's "big annual event". In fact, it's mild and lacks atmosphere. I found the parade disappointing (half of it doesn't even cover the whole route). Nagoya's obscure but bizarre and fascinating Iwatsuka kinekosa matsuri is far more interesting, but is ignored. The Inazawa matsuri mentioned above should have been mentioned under Nagoya. I didn't recognise Nagasaki Kunchi matsuri from LP's confident but awful description (P588) - it's one of the most brilliantly choreographed and thrillingly performed matsuri that I've attended. It can also be a very frustrating event for foreign tourists. LP omits all the important points.
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