Oranges, sunshine, surfing, Hollywood-that's modern California. But it's also smog, garbage, overcrowded roads, and sprawling cities. A thousand people a day pour in to add to the twenty million already there. From the highest snowy mountains to the lowest hottest deserts man's impact has been felt... by sea elephants, snow geese, Californian condors, sea otters, and the grey whales that spend half their life on an amazing migration.

This is the story of a 1,000-mile kayak voyage up the coast of Japan made by ten students: four British, six American. They experienced both the stifling calms of the Inland Sea and the storms of the Pacific, the frenzied excitement of the great Tinjin Festival, and the peace of tiny isolated islands whose inhabitants had never before seen a foreigner of any nationality. They visited the atomic dome at Hiroshima and watched the intense religious ritual of a modern Samurai swords-man. By the end they felt that, though their voyage had only been fleetingly written in the water, what they had learned would not be so soon forgotten.