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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The Art of Travel Review

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(More customer reviews)In the past, when I still regularly attended graduation parties, such parties were always teeming with graduates-to-be harbouring fanciful travel plans. Everybody seemed intent on getting away a.s.a.p., as long as possible, and to a very far away and preferably out of the way place. They wanted to become travellers, a breed not to be confused with commonplace tourists. I've never been able to detect any intrinsic motivations driving this graduate travelling habit, e.g. a deep-seated and longstanding interest in a particular country or culture. It was simply a matter of opportunity, this jumping at the a chance to be thoroughly irresponsible for a while, before entering on the responsibilities of a steady job. And of course, everybody was going and it would be very un-cool to stay at home. After these people returned from their well-organised adventures, it invariably struck me how little they had changed, and how little they had to tell about the places they had been; apart maybe from random scraps on local customs that I could as easily and more completely have found in any travel guide book. Nevertheless most of these people, even years later, would be prone to lapse into dreamy states of blissful reminiscence at the slightest cue, expressing a deep longing to go back there, preferably to stay. It got me wondering why it is that the same things we find boring or commonplace at home are suddenly deeply interesting simply because they occur 5,000 miles away.
I remember one such party where I met an acquaintance who just got her degree in philosophy. I asked her if she was planning on her more or less mandatory world trip as well. But she just gave me a weary smile, tapped the side of her head and said: `Travelling is something you do in here'.
In a nutshell that's the question and the essence of the answer in Alain de Botton's thoughtful book on travel. Why do we bother? What do we expect, and why are we so often disappointed? And then again, why do our memories of the trip rarely reflect the disappointments? And what is the clue to not being disappointed? How do you go about really experiencing the place where you are and making it part of yourself? On all such questions De Botton has interesting and often entertaining observations to make. He shows us that the exotic is not defined by long-haul flights and palm trees, but can be found literally on your doorstep if you just know how to look. He explains why a travelling Englishman can be depressed on far away and exotic Barbados and euphoric in nearby, but in many ways equally exotic Amsterdam, or even around the corner in Hammersmith where he lives. As a Dutchman I was fascinated by his detailed analysis of a sign in the arrivals hall of Amsterdam Airport, explaining its exotic nature from a British viewpoint, and the reasons you would never ever find a sign like that in the UK, just across the Channel. De Botton is a master at finding such surprising angles to elucidate his subjects. Moreover he has considerable erudition to add, resulting in an engrossing mixture of philosophical insight, personal experience, and references to artists, writers, explorers and scientists of the past. Mostly these historical figures, Flaubert in Egypt, say, or Humboldt in South America or Van Gogh in the Provence, are exemplary `artists of travel', people who knew how to make the most of their expeditions. By taking their mindset, involving energy, patience and an eye for detail, as a template, De Botton generates some useful suggestions for the modern day traveller who no longer wants to bore himself by `scoring' obligatory highlights in the guidebook star-rating order, or who refuses to be a slave to his camera any longer. He may even give you some clues as to how to deal with that greatest travelling problem of them all, the fact that wherever you go, you always have to take yourself along.
In all, an elegant, intelligent, thought-provoking, amusing and useful little book, that nobody who takes travelling seriously should miss. Don't take it with you though - it won't last you much longer than an afternoon on the beach...

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