A westerner’s guide to the REAL Japan

Chris Broad’s first book, the punnily-titled Abroad In Japan, was the light-hearted account of his time in rural Japan teaching English in a secondary school and how he fell in love with the country and never left. Now, over a decade later, he has a wildly successful YouTube channel chronicling his life there.

His follow-up book is proof of how enthusiastically he has immersed himself in his new home. Broad has travelled across the country, not just on the wondrous Shinkansen (bullet trains) but also by bike, toiling up icy mountains and freewheeling into lush valleys.

This is a side of Japan few overseas visitors see, as two-thirds only ever travel between Tokyo and Kyoto. This is a pity, Broad says, since there is so much else to marvel at in the 47 prefectures that make up this fascinating, enigmatic country.

Part travelogue, part guide book, part memoir, Journey Across Japan begins in the far north, in snow-bound Hokkaido, Japan’s last great wilderness, and ends on the islands of Okinawa in the far south, where the sea is so crystal clear that swimming underwater gives Broad a sensation of vertigo. His trips often revolve around food, from the black garlic aged for weeks until it tastes like balsamic vinegar mixed with dried plums, to the dish made by hurling blazing hot volcanic stones into a cauldron of fish broth, turning it into a rich, aromatic soup.

Forget Kobe beef, he advises, and seek out Matsusaka steak, ‘the culinary equivalent of driving a Rolls-Royce through a velvet tunnel’. He confesses, though, that one of his favourite meals is far less elevated: chicken nanban, where the meat is coated in batter, fried then dunked in mayonnaise and tartar sauce.

This is a book crammed with useful insider tips for anyone planning a visit to Japan. Kyoto is massively overcrowded and has Japan’s least friendly people, Broad says; instead, he recommends Takayama in the Japanese Alps, where you have ‘all the fantastically preserved history with a fraction of the crowds and the bonus of the alpine landscape’.

For anyone who fancies hiking up Mount Fuji, he warns it’s ‘a long relentless grind up a giant volcanic ashtray’, although he concedes that watching the sun rise from the mountain’s peak is a transcendental experience.

‘No single lifetime would ever be enough to truly appreciate the magnitude of it all’, Broad says of the country whose land mass includes 14,000 islands.

If you want to know more about Japan, and enjoy venturing off the beaten track, this book is an excellent place to start.