Following His Thumb to Find a More Quirky Japan

HOKKAIDO HIGHWAY BLUES: Hitchhiking Japan by Will Ferguson (Soho, $25, hardcover).

If Douglas Adams (“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) and P. J. O’Rourke (“Holidays in Hell”) had an extraterrestrial Satan child, he would probably write like Ferguson. That is, he’d be observant, attitudinal, occasionally offensive and very funny.

Ferguson is best known for his previous book, “Why I Hate Canadians”--a sentiment that is OK for him to express because he is a Canuck. “It sure is great being a Canadian,” he writes in his new book. “You get to share all the material benefits of living next door to the United States, yet at the same time you get to act smug, and haughty and morally superior.”

Ferguson was teaching English in rural Japan when he got the idea to tour the country by following the wave of colorful blossoms that sweeps over the nation’s cherry trees as spring moves in, south to north. The quest impressed his Japanese peers as wonderfully poetic. His mode of transportation--his thumb--struck them as dim-witted.

But off he went, like Alice down that rabbit hole, to encounter a country where people defer to his Westernness with transparent insincerity and communication takes place as “conversation by non sequitur”:

“How long will you stay in Japan?”

“Until tomorrow, forever. It is very cold in Baltimore.”

Surely, somewhere along the winding road Ferguson travels, dewy pink blossoms awaken to a gentling golden dawn. But he’s generally too preoccupied to notice that sort of thing, as he visits sight after sight that most of us never figured to find in Japan.

At the sex museum in Uijima, for example, Ferguson marvels at the abundance of porn, both ancient and pop art, and the generally blase patrons viewing it. “It is,” he concludes, “more of an anti-sex museum, so mind-gnawingly incessant that it dims desires and mutes interest from sheer sensory overload.”

Later, while attending a bullfight--two bulls fight, people bet on the outcome--he is caught between two men’s verbal battle over the bulls’ diet: live snakes, to make them mean, or snake venom-infused liquor.

And so it goes. Ferguson’s efforts to create a harmony of Canadian and Japanese sensitivities is best expressed in this haiku he wrote at a blossom-viewing party:

Early Spring--

Blossoms fall like rain

Pass me another beer, eh?

Ferguson is no poet. He is a refreshingly fragrant new bud on the blossoming travel-writing tree.

Quick Trips

THE FEARLESS FLIER’S HANDBOOK--Learning to Beat the Fear of Flying With the Experts From the Qantas Clinic by Debbie Seaman (Ten Speed Press, $11.95, paper).

This book, the brainchild of a woman who went through the Australian airline’s eight-session clinic in Sydney, is divided into 51 questions, most of them worth asking. For example:

Question: My flight was canceled due to poor visibility, but then the flight crew and airliner took off without me and the other passengers. Why?

Answer: Without passengers or luggage, the crew members are free to risk their necks as they see fit.

Q.: Are there speed limits for airliners?

A.: Yes, 288 mph below 10,000 feet, with additional stipulations near airports and on takeoff and landing, etc.

YOUR FLIGHT QUESTIONS ANSWERED--by a Jetliner Pilot by John Cronin (Plymouth Press Ltd., $9.95, paper).

Get nervous when you look out the window of a 737 and see the wing flexing like a whipsaw? No problem. It’s designed to do that.

The author, a Boeing 737 pilot for “a major U.S. airline,” hopes to calm anxious passengers with his straight-ahead factual approach. White-knucklers will be reassured, and flight aficionados will appreciate the detailed discussions of engineering, meteorology, pilot training and air traffic control.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth Sundays of the month.