Helpful FREE Applications for your Tokyo Japan Vacation

Preparing for a family vacation in a foreign country that doesn't speak your language is a daunting task, so to make planning for our Tokyo Japan vacation easier, I have enlisted the help of free downloadable applications in Google Play.
  
I have listed below the applications that proved useful to us:

1. PLANNING - I did my planning by area and  these applications were especially helpful in pointing out key attractions with descriptions.  

TRIPADVISOR  

I checked TripAdvisor a lot to see other travelers'  reviews, experiences and tips.   

Tokyo Handy Guide (by 公益財団法人東京観光財団).
The Tokyo Handy Guide the official tourism guide application of Tokyo Japan. It contains useful tourist's information on Tokyo's prime attractions by areas. 

Tokyo Travel Guide and Map (by Sygic Travel)
This application allows you to create a day by day itinerary. What cool about this application is that it computes for the estimate amount of time spent (touring the attraction and travel time from one tourist spot to another).  You can later download your itinerary via PDF.

Touch! Tokyo - Guide you to Japan (by H.I.S. Co., Ltd.)
Contains the latest events and activities information by area, including invaluable tips. It is also so easy to use.

2. BOOKING - I spent a good deal of time looking for an affordable, but comfortable and accessible place to stay in Tokyo. 

AIRBNB
I initially planned for a hotel stay, but got turned off with the expensive small and constricted hotel spaces. I turned to AirBnb looking for a Tokyo home-sweet-home. 

3. NAVIGATION - do not underestimate the power navigation applications in Japan.  I have downloaded a few, but ended up using Google Map (which proved to be very accurate) most of the time. 

Google Map
The Google Map is our best friend in Tokyo Japan. It proved useful in both walking / taking the train to our destination.

Other Navigation Apps we referred while touring Tokyo:  

Tokyo Rail Map Lite (by Urban-Map ~ Vollmer & Becker-Asano)

Tokyo Route Planner (by Unwilling Developers)

4. TRANSLATOR

JAPANESE ENGLISH TRANSLATOR (by GreenLife Apps)
This is a talking translator and an offline dictionary. It can even translate via voice recognition Japanese to English and vice versa. 

A better option, which was a find by my eldest sons is the Yominawa Japanese Translator Application.

YOMINAWA JAPANESE TRANSLATOR
It provides an easy way to translate Japanese with the use of your camera in real-time. You take of photo of word/sentence you want to translate and this application displays the English translation.


5. TOKYO DISNEYLAND RESORT - these applications helped us a lot in navigating Tokyo DisneyLand and Tokyo DisneySea

TDR WAITING TIME (by ThreeSixtyApps)
This application provides realtime attraction wait times, fastpass service status and current operation status.

PERFECT DISNEYLAND GUIDE (by UchinokoMoratte)
Aside from providing attraction wait times, this application works as a navigation map.  It was sometimes difficult to make sense of the distributed hand maps, especially if you are inside a huge park.  This application shows where you are at the moment and the actual location of the attraction you want to go to.

Let me know if you have other mobile applications ~ you have tested useful in your vacation planning.