About the Nara Handbook

The Nara Handbook was produced in 1995 by JET Program(me) participants in Japan’s Nara prefecture. The information within was either copied from previous editions or contributed by participants during the spring of 1995. The book was published by the Nara prefectural government that summer and distributed to new JET partipants that fall.

Disclaimer

As I write this (November 2008), the Nara Handbook is thirteen years old. Do not rely on the accuracy of any of the information in this publication! You should assume that every single phone number and address in this book has changed, and that every business or cultural establishment has gone out of business or otherwise ceased to exist. Again, I cannot take responsibility for harm resulting from the use of this publication!

This information is of dubious copyright status. It was commissioned by some subsection of the Nara prefectural government and printed for use by prefectural staff i.e. JET participants, rather than for general publication and distrubution. To my knowledge, thoughts about copyright never once crossed the minds of most of the writers, though in my hazy memory the editors did talk about it once or twice.

The web edition

The text of this web edition was extracted from the original MacWord documents, reformatted in reStructuredText, and typeset in Sphinx using the Alabaster theme. Pictures and diagrams were scanned from the original text.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank all the JET participants who helped put this book together, my friends and fellow travellers during a particularly favorite season of my life.

– Geoffrey Jost, editor (jefurii at gmail.com)