Imperial Palaces Guide

The Imperial Household Agency

About this app

“Imperial Palaces Guide” App is the official app of the Imperial Household Agency in Japan. It serves as the audio guide for visitors to the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, and the Kyoto Imperial Palace, and provides tour content in six languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish.
“Palaces Guide” App provides photographs related to the audio tours featured in the app: the Imperial Palace, the East Gardens of the Imperial Palace, and the Kyoto Imperial Palace. After downloading the app, users select a language and then choose from the three tours displayed on screen. This will display a map of the tour area and the audio guide points. If the app is allowed access to a device’s GPS functionality, the app will notify users when they approach a location for which commentary is available, and will show the users where they are on the map and audio commentary locations nearby.
■ Developer credits
The Imperial Household Agency
■ Notes
1. Please walk with care when viewing the map screen on the app.
2. Some content is provided through links to external sources (e.g. the Imperial Household Agency website). Please note that data rates will apply when connecting to external links.
3. The app cannot provide positional notifications on devices without GPS functionality.

Ratings and reviews

Takes ages to load. Like solid 10 minutes, on a Xiaomi recent phone and using esim. Also it misses the opportunity to use location to set yourself on the map. Otherwise, there is no correspondence between the numbers on the app map and the highlights of the park in real life, so you don't know where you are just using the map and being in front of a sightseeing spot.

As others mentioned, it can be slow to download the guides since you're downloading a lot of audio files and images. Download it on wifi ahead of time and it works great offline. Really enjoyed the guides.

The app takes so long to download the audio. Practically unusable because it gets stuck and requires downloading from the beginning.