Declan Murphy wrote:
> CL wrote:
>>Jverhey wrote:
>>
>>>I am looking for gps maps for japan in english. I have been looking very
>>>unsucessfully so far. I can find them for almost every other country except
>>>Japan.
>>
>>If you use a Garmin GPS, there is a gentleman named Endo who has
>>produced maps for the entire country.  I don't have the links handy, but
>>if that fills the bill, I will ask.
> 
> Can you ask please?

I sent a message of to the wilds of darkest Nagano and got the following 
from a correspondent who wrote when he was about to go to work.  Pardon 
the presentation.  He ordered a couple of boxes of upper case letters 
from home, but they got hung up in Customs over Golden Week:

endo's map of central japan, good for tokyo/osaka?,
train stations etc. needs mapsource to load to garmin
gps

http://www011.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mametaro/kanto-e.html

full japan road maps, not much in the way of names
needs sendmap20, (freeware, google it), to load to
garmin gps

http://www.cycleiwakuni.com/japanPOI.zip

and http://www.cycleiwakuni.com/ in the links section

if anyone uses them i'm sure a note of appreciation to
the makers would be greatfully received, these things
are a lot of work!

> <snip>
> 
>>If I'm going some place new on business and need to be there at a
>>specific time, I'll take a train and a taxi from the station or rent a
>>car.
> 
> Only times I've used car navi is in Hokkaido. The rental cars came with
> it already installed. Pretty useful for finding hotels in the middle of
> snowy nights, but I always had the sense of not knowing exactly where
> the hell I was. Give me mapple anyday.

My one experience with navi ... and a talking one at that ... was 
installed in a Toyota Vitz; one of the early ones with the oval in the 
top of the dashboard that all of the meters sort of floated around 
inside of and made you seasick.  I had to go to a town on the other side 
of the bay, so it talked me down to the ferry and even managed to sound 
peeved when I missed a turn.  The one thing it couldn't tell me was that 
one other stop I had to make along that peninsula was just 5km east of 
where I was at the time, so instead of being efficient, I ended up 
driving back to Kagoshima and taking the train to Miyazaki, where I 
caught a one-car train on a one-track route to the end of the line and 
waited four hours for a train back to Miyazaki so I could get stuck in 
Myakonojo.

CL