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Rating: 
Summary: Is there a point?
Review: All I can say is that this book was soo enlightneing and interesting that I have read it 4 times. The excitment, the wonder the thrill as Josie deepens and increases her significant knowledge of China and enlightens the reader upon the kind, thoughtful and always welcoming folk who live there. It makes me want to grab my bike and head west tomorrow.
If you want a good read that is quite deep, but at the same time very light even thought it is a pretty long masterpiece, I suggest you pick a copy up. You'll be thrilled excited and educated all at once. A work of art.
Rating:
Summary: Mildly entertaining, but mostly cliched and annoying
Review: I bought this book to read while I was in Japan on a two-week trip to Tokyo. Let me say up-front that I am definitely not a crunchy-granola adventure traveler-type of person; I like camping trips as long as they last only a weekend and when I vacation I like going to big cities and taking advantage of what a large metropolis has to offer. Maybe that is why I disliked this book so much, because Josie Dew and I are apparently very different.
One thing that annoyed me about the book was how derogatory she was about Japan's metropolitan areas, although she seemingly chose to spend a great deal of time in them. She never fully explains how she ended up in Japan for her cycling tour, and yet she complains ad nauseum about how crowded the country is and how hard it was to find unspoiled wilderness and places to camp. Um, I think ANYONE who knows ANYTHING about Japan understands that it's crowded over there. I think if she had done ANY research about Japan before going there she would have found out in short order that the place is either largely metropolitan or very mountainous, and because they are an industrial superpower there probably isn't a lot of unspoiled wilderness around Tokyo, Chiba and Yokohama, three of the most densely populated cities in the world. Personally, I loved Tokyo - I loved how busy and bustling it was and could have spent months there seeing all the sights. But maybe that is because I did some homework before my trip and knew what to expect; something Dew obviously didn't do.
The other thing that really annoyed me was something I've encountered before: the nature enthusiast who gets peeved when he or she discovers that the residents of a foreign land haven't kept large swaths of their countryside pristine and hospitable to adventure travelers. Dew complains about how "dirty" some parts of Japan are and how the people in Japan "ruined" some areas that could have been beautiful - well, Josie, probably the people in Japan were more concerned about building their society and furthering their economy than keeping their countryside preserved in a manner that would be acceptable to you, on the off chance you would decide to visit Japan. Her attitude is extremely self-centered and arrogant; she doesn't seem to realize that most people in Japan are trying to make a living and don't have the wherewithal to take off cycling and complaining for several months out of the year.
Finally, my other big gripe with the book is how Dew repeatedly stereotypes and makes fun of the Japanese people who host her in their homes and give her things they could probably ill-afford to part with. She relied heavily on Japanese hospitality and generosity, but acts blithely about it. She definitely wouldn't have been able to make it through Japan without people giving her things, yet in many cases she took things from people who were poor (much poorer than she herself) and yet she doesn't seem appreciative of what people offered her or seem to "get" that their generosity cost them much more than she had the right to ask from them.
Also - some of the cultural information she provides about Japan is plain wrong. She never lists sources for the historical and cultural information she imparts, but whatever her sources were they were highly inaccurate.
This was the first Josie Dew book I read and it will be the last. I just don't have much tolerance for high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou tomes like this where the author makes it clear that anyone who bothered to graduate from college and get a real job is beneath her contempt. I don't know why people like this bother touring foreign places; their attitudes never change no matter what they see or who they meet. According to Dew, industrialization and capitalism = bad and they don't seem to get that capitalism and industrialization is what enables them to be able to tool around on their bikes while other people are working.
Rating: 
Summary: not good for swatting flies
Review: i disagree with the user below who said this book is good for swatting flies. it is too heavy--like nuking a flea. however, there are good things in this book. strangely though, it has nothing to do with china as one reader thought. i guess this is a very controversial book. her next one is about the same stuff 2 years later, but is bound to be even more controversial due to some pics of the author bathing au natural in it. it can be used for a door stop if you don't like it.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book. Funny inciteful and hard to put down!
Review: I have to say, I disagree with many of the reviews of this title. I found Josie very thoughtful of Japanese contradictions, traditions and ways of life. I bought this book because it was the only travel writing on Japan that looked interesting at the time and I was very pleased. I have bought all of the rest of her books just because I love her style of writing. It's her sense of humour that lightens the situations she faces......and guess what? She ends the book to go back home for her brother's wedding...and so she is going to write another one! Japan 2 is the working title. Yay! Buy this NOW and preorder the next!
Rating: 
Summary: Long, repetitive, full of fallacies and self-congradulation
Review: I loved Josie Dew's first book, "The Wind in my Wheels" when I read it back in 1990, shortly after a long, solo bicycle tour I took in Europe. She was wide-eyed and playful then, writing solely about the experiences that she met along the way, without trying to define the nature of the countries she encountered. So when Neon Sun came along, naturally I snatched it up at the bookstore here in Tokyo, where I live. At first I had mixed reactions about what I started reading. Here again capered the ever-undaunted sprite of Josie Dew, this time in Japan. However, as the book went on it grew more into a collection of facts than of a bicycle journey. Granted, Dew has done her homework, but nearly all the knowledge in the book is second or third-hand, all strung together to give the impression that Dew is knowledgeable about Japan- which she is decidedly NOT. All she has ended up doing is writing yet ANOTHER "this is Japan" book, by one of those fleeting passersthrough who can't even speak the language. As someone who has lived in Japan and associated with it for nigh on 31 years (I grew up and worked here altogether 19 years), speaks Japanese, most of whose friends are Japanese, teaches English to Japanese students, loves the country as my own, has Japanese in-laws, and has bicycled in most of the areas that Dew writes about and more, her ignorant statements about what the country is all about infuriated me, because she is perpetuating myths about Japan that are simply not true. A few examples: the Japanese do NOT speak the way she has rendered their English dialogue; "Fuji-san" does NOT mean "honourable Fuji"...(the "san" here is the formal, Chinese reading of the character for mountain, otherwise read as "yama"...Fuji-san should not be called "Fujiyama" as so many westerners mistakenly read the characters); counter to Dew's proclamation, the Japanese LOVE camping (go to any bookstore and peruse the magazine racks); and all women are NOT subservient to men here (to imply so is deeply insulting to women and men in Japan, an arrogance that attempts to render them as somehow not modern or "liberated"...go DEEPLY into the daily culture of the people before you judge them..that means speak to them in THEIR language, on their terms, women and men included..I doubt that in Dew's tiny period in Japan that any of her hosts felt intimate enough to open such controversial issues with her, especially because most Japanese know how vehemently westerners feel about the issues). The scene that finally was the last straw for me was when Dew was staying with Motoharu and Hiromi Nakashima. One evening Mrs. Nakashima asks that Dew sit down with her husband for a conversation. Because Mrs. Nakashima does not join them, Dew immediately interprets it as Mr. Nakashima's acting the chauvinist male. But reading the way the conversation ensued, I gathered that Mr. Nakashima was trying to conduct a very serious talk with her, from an elder to a younger person, about his and Mrs. Nakashima's worry about her safety. Having Mrs. Nakashima out of the room signified that they probably didn't want to embarress Dew with weight of what they wanted to say by having too many people in the room. That is why Mrs. Nakashima moved about so quietly. When the conversation touched upon the difference between GB-UK, that was probably just an ice-breaker, something to make convesation before launching into what Mr. Nakashima thought was a serious matter. What hit me was when confronted with the problem of GB-UK, Dew couldn't even give an educated reply, spewing an inanity like, "Why couldn't Motoharu ask me something easy, like how many ball-bearings did I have in the fixed cup of my bottom bracket?" And here she is, a whole 689 pages of knowing all about Japan, and she can't even answer a simple question about her own culture! I threw the book down on the floor in disgust. There are better travel books about Japan out there, namely Alan Booth's "The Roads to Sata", and better bicycle journey books, like Tom Vernon's "A Fat Man On a Bicycle" or Dervla Murphy's bicycle books. I have been close to Japan all my life and have met and read stories by countless people who claim to know all about Japan, and yet have spent very little time here or cannot speak the language. It is hard to understand why such people are taken seriously in America and Europe. Surely such people, if they were to make such statements about countries in Europe or North America, would be laughed out of the publishing industry? Japan is not an "exotic" place. It is a place of human beings, not so different from any one else.
Rating:
Summary: useful for swatting flies
Review: It's interesting to note that it's people with "yellow fever" (the love of all things Asian) who have leaped to the defense fo Japan just because Miss Dew doesn't have a full cultural awareness of the countries she cycles through. Lighten up people, she is just "passing through" and if you expect to pick up deep cultural insight from what essentially is a light-hearted travelogue then you have very strange expectations. As it is, Josie paints a very fond picture of Japan and it's peoples and it's clear she utterly loves the place. Travelogues are as much autobiographical as they concern the country travelled in and I would say the author's failure to understand some aspects of Japanese culture and therefore draw incorrect conclusions is more of a reflection of Josie than of Japan. Miss Dew does a good job of portraying modern Japan and many of it's little idiosyncracies and yes, she does notice and comment on some of it's not so-good points much to the irritation of reviewers below who clearly have a lovers' blind infatuation with the country. Every country has a bad side but the overwhelming picture from this book is that Japan is a wonderful place to visit and it's bad side is minimal. The Japanese tourist industry should be well-pleased at the glowing praise the author lavishes on the country as she describes her extensive bicycle tour about the islands. The book is satisfyingly long and written in an informail chatty style that is quite engaging. I am deducting stars however for the common problems that afflict modern travel-writing by the young - that is the ending is always rushed and the later destinations are really not well-depicted because of this and also, the tendency of writers to look down on fellow travellers and "dis" them at every opportunity - a problem most acute in backpacker writings. Other than that I highly recommend it.
Rating: 
Summary: the wheels go 'round
Review: josie dew is one of my favorite cycling writers, but.... this time she seems to have gone overboard. 700 pages of what seems like a transcribed journal-snore. her first two books are excellent. for a hilarious view of americans, try-"travels in a strange state". i sincerely wish ms. dew a rapid recovery!
Rating:
Summary: An encyclopaedia of cliches
Review: Looking forward to a nice fat read, I found myself losing interest after the first 100 pages or so as Ms Dew served up cliche after cliche about Japan and the Japanese (Isn't Tokyo really big and aren't Japanese people really small?). One of the weaknesses of this book is the fact that Ms Dew has read several generic texts on Japan and now seems determined to regurgitate every last fact for our benefit. Another is Ms Dew's "auto-exotica"; her constant description of herself as a "mad gaijin" or "wild-eyed barbarian" is irritating in it's repetition, like a joke you have heard a hundred times. Similarly, she slips into the old, annoying foreigner-in-Japan habit of employing Japanese vocabulary for everyday English words (hence her bicycle is given the honour of becoming "jitensha" for the duration of the book). The latter half of this volume improves in that, having run out of generalisations, Ms Dew gets on with detailing the locations and people she encounters, and this she does beautifully. What a pity, then, to lapse every few pages into "don't the Japanese write funny things on their T-shirts"-mode. This book doesn't fail in it's mission because it never really decides what it's mission should be- is it a travelogue or a potted-Japan guide book. I bought it as the former and was disappointed when it included much of the latter too. Buy this book if Japan unknown to you- you'll enjoy it! If you are not a complete Japan novice, know that what you are getting here is some good and interesting anecdotal writing mixed with a hefty dose of everything you have read before. And the Bill Bryson comparisons? Hmm, I don't think so. Not even the female one.
Rating:
Summary: Japan, magnet for brainless, aspiring travel writers...
Review: This book is shockingly poor. The Japan I have lived in for 5 years (as an English teacher) bears no resemblance to the Japan depicted by this trite slab of pulp unworthy of its own binding. Sadly, I realise that this 'gaijin' fool - this blacksmith of gross cultural simplifications, this purveyor of only the best-known cliches - is not alone. Her inadequate, self-flattering account recalls anecdotes I hear from other English teachers. Faced with such defiant, cultural adversity, their love of cultural difference morphs into a reinforced belief in the superiority of their own culture. They love and yet they hate, so why do they stay? My advice to Josie Dew: on yer' bike, it's time to go home and stay home.
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