ONCE A FOOL! - From Japan to Alaska by Amphibious Jeep

by Boye De Mente

Overview

This is my account of an incredible 4-month long crossing of the North Pacific Ocean, Bering Sea and Shellikof Strait from Hokkaido, Japan to Anchorage, Alaska on an amphibious jeep dubiously named "Half-Safe" by its Australian owner who was in a 10-year process of sailing it around the world. I joined him in Tokyo and hung in until we reached Anchorage... The accidents and incidents that occurred to the jeep and between Carlin and myself include encounters with a Russian patrol ship, Japanese fishing nets, dealing with the torpedo-shaped gas tank we towed behind us and gassing up in bad weather, getting stuck in great beds of kelp, coming close to disaster several times; not to mention murder, meeting some incredible people along the Aleutian chain of islands, being mistaken for a Russian submarine, "floating" over a boiling sea, and finally encounting a 12-mile an hour tide when our top speed was 3 miles an hour when the ocean was smooth. The journey proved again the things people will do just to prove that they can do it. In this case, we made the Guinness Book of World Records. We also proved that the World War II amphibious jeeps [most of which sank immediately when off-loaded from transport ships] were capable of incredble feats after a bit of clever re-fitting.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940012221728
Publisher:	Phoenix Books / Publishers
Publication date:	02/14/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Boyé Lafayette De Mente has been involved with Japan, China, Korea and Mexico since the late 1940s as a member of a U.S. intelligence agency, student, journalist, editor and author working out of Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. He is a graduate of Jochi University in Tokyo, and The American Institute for Foreign Trade (in 1953), now Thunderbird School of Global Management, in Glendale, Arizona, USA.

De Mente wrote the first ever books on the Japanese way of doing business (Japanese Etiquette and Ethics in Business in 1959 and How to Do Business in Japan in 1962), and was the first to introduce the now commonly used Japanese terms wa, nemawashi, kaizen, tatemae-honne, shibui, sabi and wabi to the outside business world!

His 70-plus other books run the gamut from language learning to the night-time "pink" trades in Japan, the role of bars, cabarets and geisha houses in business, the sensual nature of Oriental cultures, male-female relations, and understanding and coping with the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mexican mindset in business and social situations.

He has also written extensively about contemporary American culture, particularly the male dominance and religious dogma factor that is destroying the American dream.