Japan Maps for Garmin - Go Go OSM!

Thanks to Garmin, there are no "officially supported" maps for Japan available to English speakers. They won't even supply travellers with the option of maps labelled in Japanese. So what the fuck is a desperate Aussie to do about loading up their Garmin Zumo 660 for a Japanese trip? Well, they must turn to the dark side. Take the road less travelled. Grab some open source maps from the interweb community and get those installed on the Zumo instead.

Now there are plenty of commercial offerings to be found and purchased on the interweb as well. Many companies offer Japanese maps for Garmin devices, but most of them use out of date map data. The best I could find was data from 2011, and all for the low, low price of $198AUD or there abouts. That's the same ballpark as just hiring a GPS for the 8 days I need it for, so it's really not worth the expense.

However, there *is* a community providing freely available Open Source maps online -  the OpenStreetMap project. Personally I trust Open Source stuff much more readily than commercial offerings because it's created by people who are actually interested in the product, not just a bunch of seedy business types out for a quick buck. In my experience, once a product becomes a commercial entity, the commercial investment in it's upkeep, and let's face it the love from it's owners, drops off dramatically.

OSM Japan - an awesome resource for your Garmin GPS.

Anyway enough with the gushing over Open Source. I found a good map for Japan by consulting the OpenStreetMap project. The map, (provided as a .IMG file ready for copying onto your Garmin device) can be found here: http://admincabal.com/osm/. To copy the map onto a Garmin Zumo:

1. Connect the GPS to your computer over USB 
2. Find the directory /Garmin
3. Copy the file gmapsupp.img onto the Zumo into /Garmin.
4. Make sure you get the filename correct. It is important as this name is already entered as a valid map name in the Garmin XML configuration on the device.

These steps will get any *normal* open source map working on the Garmin. However for the Japan map, it is also important to make sure Japanese fonts are also installed on the device. To get the Japanese fonts in-place, follow these additional steps:

1. Download this Garmin Nuvi 200 update and extract it (run the .exe file). It will extract its contents into directory C:\Garmin. 
2. With your Zumo connected via USB, browse directory \Garmin\ExtData on your unit. 
3. Make a backup of font files 006-D0952-05.bin and 06-D0952-06.bin from \Garmin\ExtData. 
4. Rename 006-D1053-60.bin and 006-D1053-67.bin from the update to 006-D0952-05.bin and 06-D0952-06.bin respectively. 
5. Copy these new versions into \Garmin\ExtData on the unit to replace the originals. 

Once the fonts are replaced, you can start creating routes and copying them up to the Zumo. 

Japanese routes finally working successfully on my Zumo.

One thing to note is that your Japan routes will not be pre-processed successfully until the map is installed on the device. Any routes you copy on to the Zumo before the map is installed will garbage as the device wont be able to calculate the route. Apart from this, everything should work as advertised. Happy trails!