Dear Japan Olympic and Tourism bureaus: please enable offline Google Maps

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Grr! Why?!
One of the great tips for traveling internationally is to download an offline Google Map of the area you're visiting so you can find your way even when you don't have cellular or Wi-Fi access. Japan has blocked this feature for years. I have no idea why, but I have a lot of awesome conspiracy theories, most of which involve competing map products' CEO's belonging to the same country club as Japan's Google liaison.

But we're in the big run-up to the 2020 Olympics and all signs point to the fact that Japan is attempting in earnest to make things easier for visitors – expanding Wi-Fi access, adding more English/Chinese/Korean signage, standardizing the buttons on their famous toilets... So why the f&*k is this super-convenient feature still being blocked?

As an alternative, I've used Here maps. I've also heard many folks praise Maps.me. Navitime and Citymapper are also super useful for navigating Tokyo.

 

Furthermore…

While I'm on the topic of unsolicited advice that will never get read by anyone in power, there should absolutely be a national campaign to encourage restaurants and shops to stop using hand-lettered menus and signs so that visitors can quickly use Google Translate's image reading feature. Now the little mom and pop shop doesn't need to hire costly translators – just print that menu in a decent-sized font and Google could quickly turn it into Dutch on the user's phone. Or Thai. Or English. But I suppose this request assumes that Japanese people actually want foreigners eating in their restaurants, which might very well not be the case.

Srsly, how da fuq google sposta read this, Japan?








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