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Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 1 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | Take a humorist from the Great White North — one part Bob and Doug McKenzie, the other Bill Bryson — feed him lots of sake, and set him loose hitchhiking his way through polite Japanese society. The result is one of the warmest and funniest travelogues you've read. It had never been done before. Not in four thousand years of Japanese recorded history had anyone followed the Cherry Blossom Front from one end of the country to the other. Nor had anyone hitchhiked the length of Japan. And, as Ferguson learns, it illustrates that to travel is better than to arrive.
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Will Ferguson | | Paperback: | 432 pages | | Publisher: | Canongate U.S. | | Publication Date: | April 21, 2006 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1841957852 | | Package Length: | 8.0 inches | | Package Width: | 5.4 inches | | Package Height: | 1.2 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.95 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 11 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 11 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 15 found the following review helpful:
 No book captures the experience of being here better Dec 30, 2006
By Amazon3421
Books about Japan by westerners seem to fall into two categories- literary books that talk about Japan in poetic terms and dwell on traditional culture, and comedy books that play up the wacky side of Japanese pop culture for laughs. Somewhere in between is "Hitching Rides with the Buddha"- a book by a foreigner who actually lived here for 5 years, speaks Japanese (as modest as he is about his blunders with the grammar), and really has an understanding of its people and its way of life.
Written as a modern day answer to Alan Booth's "The Road to Sato", this book details Ferguson's cross-country hitchhiking trip from mainland Japan's southernmost point in Kyushu to the northernmost point in Hokkaido, covering thousands of miles and encountering people from all walks of life, from teenagers to senior citizens and from ski bums to college professors.
At first, I was a bit sceptical about reading a book based on a trip hatched, by Ferguson's own admission, while falling-down drunk at a cherry blossom-viewing party in rural Kyushu. What kind of expert could he be?
But speaking as someone who loves Japan and has lived here almost 5 years myself, this book gets to the heart of the experience better than any other I know, and does a great job capturing the joy, delight, confusion and even occasional sorrow that comes when interacting with this amazing culture. Inspired by this book, I sometimes take off on similar hitch hiking trips during breaks at the university I teach at, and even made the same trip from Kyushu to Hokkaido. Every trip is a different adventure, and I'm glad that someone as talented as Ferguson wrote about it.
10 of 10 found the following review helpful:
A good read after Alan Booth's "The Roads to Sata" Nov 28, 2006
By Justin J
Hitchhiking from Cape Sata to Cape Soya in Japan, William Ferguson creates a good follow up to Alan Booth's "The Roads to Sata". As humorous as it is scholarly, one comes from this book feeling they somewhat understand many aspects of Japanese culture, such as Shintoism. I say somewhat because, as Ferguson clearly shows in the narrative, it's impossible to ever understand the Japanese fully without being Japanese. A good read for any time.
6 of 6 found the following review helpful:
I'm only halfway through this book... Jan 14, 2008
By which road
....but I must say, besides it being funny and a real treat to read, I find that the author has a beautiful way with words that is not so often seen in travel writing. Chapter 10 may very well be one of the best chapters in a book I have ever read, and re-read, and read again. Beautiful words and beautiful images. I look forward to finishing the book this week, and thus far, can say that I highly recommend this book who not only enjoy good writing, but also a good laugh. - Vince Yanez, Author of It Doesn't Matter Which Road You Take: A European Travel Story
5 of 5 found the following review helpful:
Apparently a re-print of Ferguson's "Hokkaido Highway Blues" Aug 14, 2008
By Dale Harshman
I read Ferguson's "Hokkaido Highway Blues" several years ago back when I was on JET Program in the Amakusa islands off the west coast of Kyushu (where Ferguson himself initially lived). I really enjoyed the book, and was excited to see that he had apparently written another hitching book about Japan. But upon closer inspection looking at the table of contents and excerpts on Amazon, I found that "Hitching Rides with Buddha" is actually a re-print of "Hokkaido Highway Blues" which appears to be out of print. Regardless, I echo all the positive reviews here that this book captures much more of the "real" Japan and Japanese people than most other books. It helps that the book is both insightful and often hilarious. If you liked this, then also check out Alan Booth's "The Roads to Sata" which was the inspiration for Ferguson's own hitching adventure.
7 of 8 found the following review helpful:
 Sometimes insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes irritating Sep 09, 2009
By Antonio
This appears to be a reprint of the Hokkaido Highway Blues, this could potentially mislead buyers who were thinking he had written a new book about Japan.
I will give my brief impressions of the book. Firstly the good parts, I believe he does capture with reasonable accuracy the experience of a foreigner in Japan. Also I don't disagree with the majority of his observations about japan. Although this book was written in the 1990s from my perspective not a great deal has changed (I lived in Japan for several years relatively recently). Moreover the book does have some quite decent humour, and is relatively well written making it a fairly quick read.
The bad parts, people looking for lots of suggestions of interesting places to visit may be disappointed, although he does visit some places of interest to the tourist, for much of the book he follows a route far from the more developed parts of Japan and a lot of the places described in these chapters are not especially interesting. The author complains often about negative stereotypes Japanese hold about foreigners, but then he leaps to his own stereotypes of Japanese. Now that is not to say that there aren't a reasonable number of Japanese that fit these stereotypes, but I think he paints with too broad a brush at times. Also although I have come across people who resemble some of the more annoying people in his book, most Japanese are not always so in your face with their prejudices. I suspect he has used some dramatic license with regards to some of the characters he meets, but then again maybe not.
At times the author does kind across as kind of arrogant and smug and he obviously pictures himself as an astute observer of the human condition. Also his attitude towards women is sometimes worrying. One example that struck me was he met a woman who was a tour guide at a brewery. Later she tries to keep in touch "... for awhile I received postcards and letters in carefully printed English, with the a's written like those on a typewriter , with the curly bits on top", but the author decides she isn't the women in distress that he is looking for and so doesn't answer her letters, "I was looking for: someone to rescue. Someone to sweep up and carry away. Someone to save. I never answered Ariko's letters".
Another example is when he scolds a young mother who stops to give him a ride. It seems kind of strange to be hitchhiking and then berate someone for giving them a ride. "Don't pick up hitchikers .. not late in the day when you have children in the car", when the woman tries to explain how he looked sad by the side of the road, he berates her further "I'm sorry but it's not a good idea ... I'm sorry but you really shouldn't". You just want to smack the author on the side of the head and tell him to cut the woman some slack.
One funny example where the author comes unstuck trying to make himself out to be cleverer than he is, is when he meets an obnoxious japanese man while riding on the sado island jet foil who states "Japanese technology number one in the world!" (referring to the jet foil). The author then writes "He was wrong of course, as most nationalists ultimately are. I happened to know all about hovercrafts. They were invented by the Scottish born American citizen, Alexander Graham Bell ...". Although Alexander Graham Bell may well be able to take at least some of the credits for hydrofoil boats (such as the jet foil), they are completely different from hovercraft or air-cushion vehicles.
I'm not sure how much this book will appeal to people who have spent a significant time in Japan, as you may have had similar experiences and drawn your own interpretations from them.
In conclusion then, this book would make a good antidote for people who are obsessed with anime and believe Japan is some kind of paradise (despite never having visited there), also I do recommend this book to people who are interested in living in or travelling to Japan. Although at times the author is guilty of hubris even this aspect of the book does have a valuable lesson as it is extremely common to meet foreigners in Japan who have an inflated opinion of themselves. The truth is any clown with a college degree can get on a plane to japan and scrounge around for some lowly paid english teaching work, it doesn't make you a magnet for Japanese woman or an expert on all things Japanese. Despite some of my negative comments I think this a worthwhile read.
See all 11 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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