This book is excellent in its description and its balance between Barthes' experience in Japan with his own theory. As he says, it would be ethically problematic for him to call this "Japan" the actual Japan. Rather this is his experiences in it situated in his prior work.

There are chapters in this work that couldn't be written better. They explain exactly how one might think of food, for example, in a semiotic way that might at first seem alien, but later become clearly a way in which one could methodologically evaluate the differences of various cultures as we approach them.

There are also, as in most of Barthes' work, some unnecessary bits. There are parts of this book that are entirely stylistic and don't seem to add much to the book. This book probably could have only had 3/4ths of the work here and still gotten the entirety of the analytical point across.