What was nice about living in Japan was having a new keitai with the GPS Navi! features - that made maps obsolete.

As for guidebooks, I think I had the Top 25 one (I would lend that out to people who were visiting), some guide to "Hiking Japan," and Time Out Tokyo. Time out was pretty decent - although I'd have to say that after the first few days, I'd just be checking online or in Metropolis to see what was going on.

There's a couple of very good websites for Kyoto (just Google: kyoto events), but i found that the best was KYOTO VISITOR'S GUIDE - http://www.kyotoguide.com . It's frequently updated, and you can see what's going on while you're there, especially if there's any special events going on (like the fact that the romantic train has started running again... )