By Amy Chavez

Anyone recognize this guidebook? Originally published in 1964 in five volumes, the tome in the photo above was a second issue published in 1992 in a single volume: a whopping 1,341 pages, 135 maps, 85 sketches and 2,099 festival dates! It weighs one kilogram. Even back in the day when travelers lugged around guidebooks, I can’t imagine schlepping around something like this, having to winch it out of my backpack every time I wanted to look up some information. But according to reader reviews on Amazon, enough people did, and to this day harbor a special attachment to the book. En route to the tourist sites, perhaps these people made their children carry it. The fact that the single volume weighs in at exactly one kilogram suggests to me that this edition may have been edited down to that figure. I say this because the author has deleted as many definite and indefinite articles as possible, to the point that much of the book sounds like someone’s personal notes:

Ise Daijingu, Home of Sun Goddess Here in forest primeval is Japan’s birth bower. In first centuries of Christian era these islands witnessed progressive waves of foreign human and cultural invasions, which melded with original inhabitants and each other, gradually creating this amalgam we know as Japan. Seal on this unification of groups as well as of wedding of continental organization with indigenous aesthetic, was establishment of JINGU, Grand Shrine of Ise, which stands today, unchanged for at least fifteen centuries.

The only reason I can think of why someone would write this way is to save space. Unless the authors just couldn’t be bothered to turn their notes into prose. But I doubt that since the book is thorough enough to suggest these are not lazy writers. The sole Editorial Review on Amazon notes “the text is choppy” as if the author where aboard a ship during a storm when he wrote it. Entirely possible. The review goes on to rave that the book “covers not only where to go but what to do.” Apparently, that was a bonus at the time the guidebook was written.

Since it is doubtful that the three authors went to all of the places listed (which would take a lifetime), producing such a volume of this scope would have necessitated copying information directly from tourist brochures and translating from Japanese guidebooks (no internet back then). But such information in English would have been in high demand and the authors would have found an eager audience to read their book.

Japan Inside Out is surely a classic, and probably serves better as a reference book for most of us. Though it is now out of print, It can be bought used on Amazon for US$7.51