In 1977, British author and long-term Tokyo resident Alan Booth made a journey on foot from the northernmost point in Japan, Cape Soya, to Kyushu's southernmost tip, Cape Sata.
Booth's account of that epic trek, "The Roads to Sata," became one of the classic Japan travel books of the modern age, with its vivid but witty portrayal of rural Japan in the '70s and the quirky characters who populated it.
Booth has now, sadly, passed away — he died of colon cancer in 1993 — and the Japan he wrote about has also gone. Yet the will or desire to make the challenging journey from one end of the country to the other remains alive and well, and since Booth's time numerous foreigners have covered the same top-to-tail route on foot or two wheels.