No comments about Last Country.

No comments about The Lady and the Monk. Four Seasons in Kyoto..

No comments about Venice (Photopocket).

1 comments about Making It in Japan: Work, Life, Leisure and Beyond.

1. Seven years ago, the book would have been much more useful, but many of the contacts listed have gone out of business. I did manage to mine a few gems, however.

   The book is highly idiosyncratic, which is itself not an argument against it. However - this will sound harsh - it's oriented to the young Canadian, Aussie, or Kiwi recent college graduate with a useless liberal arts degree, whose only real prospects for employment here are teaching English to people who won't learn it, or the would-be gaijin model or club hostess.

   For someone who ostensibly spent a few years here as of the writing of the book, Gauthier dwells unnecessarily on "strange foods" few of us consider strange. Most of the anecdotes are of the tired "culture shock" variety more appropriate to a traveller back in the 60's or 70's.

   Stick to fj.life.in-japan.

No comments about Japan Seriously.

No comments about Kyoto & Nara The Soul of Japan.

No comments about The 2007-2012 Outlook for Conventional Travel Trailers in Japan.

No comments about Explore Kyoto : Silver Collector's Series.

No comments about Ceylon - The Paradis.

1 comments about Lonely Planet Citiescape Tokyo (Lonely Planet Citiescape. Tokyo).

1. "Tokyo - Citiescape" from Lonely Planet is a coffee-table book scaled to fit a vest pocket. Each of the forty or so color photographs, the kind that you wish you had the talent to have taken, targets a single aspect of the city's people, culture, or places and is accompanied by text that is appreciative and insightful. My main complaints are that the text is printed in black against blue or silver and, hence, quite difficult to read and that the photo captions, collected at the end of the book, lack sufficient detail. Make no mistake - this is not a guidebook and won't help one wit to navigate this extraordinary city. Rather, I would recommend it as reading before a first trip to prepare for the experiences ahead or after the return to evoke memories of those experiences.