Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan Review

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(More customer reviews)In the 80's it seemed that almost any foreigner who spent much time in Japan felt obliged to write a book about their experiences. This lead to a lot of dull, pithy, pedestrian writing in which the same standard Japan cliches and themes were raised again and again to the point where self-parody became a real danger. Many of these works amount to little more than the product of a writer's conceit in having been published.
However, the best travel book I have ever read on Japan has just been published: 'Hokkaido Highway Blues' by Will Ferguson.
in 1996, Ferguson hitchiked the length of Japan, hardly a feat worthy of the 'extreme' category of travel writing currently in vogue, but certainly of interest to those of us who have spent time in foreign locales of no particular touristicattractions and have admired them precisely because of their normalcy- as a microcosm of the country at large. Ferguson spends much time in such locales nominally following the cherry blossom front from the southernmost point of Kyushu, up the lesser known Japan Sea side of Japan to the northern tip of Hokkaido. Along the way Ferguson converses and interacts with drunken truck drivers, high-school aged fisherman, sporty hedonistic new people, possible gangsters, overbearing intellectuals- a piece of Japanese society at large.
This is also a book that shows Ferguson to be an articulate, perceptive and very witty writer. Ferguson can paint words with the tender strokes of an impressionist only to be followed by Dave Barry-like ironies and double entendres. Ferguson is aware of the Japan cliches and stereotypes but does not ignore them. He calls a spade a spade when necessary but invariably with great wit and insight. On worn out cliches he is savvy enough to provide new perspectives that are enlightening yet not encumbering the reader with dull, indulgent academia.
Ferguson displays an inner understanding of Japan that matches Alan Booth ('The Roads To Sata'-hitherto considered THE travel writer on Japan) and far outdistancing the myriad sophomoric writers of the late 80's (including Pico Iyer's highly literate but maudlin and fanciful ' The Monk and the Lady'). Ferguson seeks not only to grumble but to praise Japan, and always with both incisive anecdotes on the state of modern Japan plus humourous self-parody of the 'gaijin'. Particularly funny are the situations in which Ferguson, a Canadian, is automatically deemed to be American everywhere he goes despite protestations to the contrary. This allows Ferguson to take some lighthearted jabs at both the U.S. and Britain while acting as a kind of underhanded, tongue-in-cheek Canadian ambassador. Thankfully, unlike Booth and Iyer, Ferguson does not seem to take himself so seriously .
Perhaps that which is most endearing about Ferguson to the reader, is that he is 'one of us', a run-of-the-mill expat, in his case as an language teacher at a remote Japanese high school who spent several years in Kumamoto (one who can really WRITE however). He is knowledgable enough about Japan and the language without falling into the common expat writer's trap of becoming a know-it-all pedant.
I highly recommend this book to any foreigners living in Japan, to Japanese people who can read English, anyone who has lived in Japan and anyone about to come- in short, just about anybody with an interest in Japan.

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