I’ve finally created an annotated Google Map of Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture in English. The major places of interest have been marked on the map. The sidebar lists them in alphabetical order (except for train stations and city hall which appear at the top of the list). Kusatsu was the only city left for which I didn’t have a map. I now have annotated Google Maps in English for all of Shiga’s cities and towns. Also, I’ve incorporated short URLs for all of the Google Maps. You can see them on the shiga-ken.com home page under Maps.

Google Map for Kusatsu: http://goo.gl/maps/zFVsQ

My apologies to people and visitors in Kusatsu for the delay in making this map. When I first started making Google Maps years ago, the Japan maps still didn’t have English place names. We also couldn’t rearrange the order of the annotated places in the sidebar. The map URLs were also very long. Due to such limitations, my initial attempts to create Google Maps were rudimentary and less motivated. I knew that improvements had to come sooner or later, so I waited. Now that these problems have been resolved, I will be adding more places to the maps to make them more useful. I know that there is a demand when I see thousands of views for each map I have created. The annotations are also linked to my Web site with thumbnail images and links to my photo albums.