The author herself describes the book as nothing but a record by a Japanese housewife who for a short time stopped eating her own sukiyaki to sample the hospitality of America. Her English was shaky, but she never minded making blunders; as she says, "the fun of my trip is that hopping on one leg I should have hiked through America without difficulty." She made friends wherever she went. In fact I suspect that a Japanese lady travelling by herself in the States is still enough of a novelty to attract a good deal of notice. She was interviewed and photographed and invited to a P. E. N. Club dinner where she met J. B.
Priestley. At an "Asia" lunch party she talked with Pearl Buck, and praises her (somewhat prematurely!) for not writing a novel about the China incident.
Polyglot "Good Morning"
Mrs. Ichikawa took in most of the usual "sights" in the course of her trip, the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls, Boulder Dam, Grand Canyon, etc, and she gives an entertaining description of a Christmas service at the Angelus Temple, "more like a pantomime than a church service."
The Heavenly Kingdom itself was just ko a decorated cake and I thought it was ridiculous that so many. virtuous people rushed in there like a stream of ants.
She has a failing not uncommon in globe-trotters She loves to let people know that she has travelled. Concord reminds her of the Lake District, for instance, and she takes a childish pleasure in being able to say "good morning" (and, as far as I can make out, nothing else) in a variety of languages. Mrs. Ichikawa does, however, give the impression that she says what she really thinks and not what she feels she ought to say. and her book makes light and entertaining reading. It is worth reading, too, for the sidelights it throws on life in Japan and the contrasts she notices everywhere between the poverty of Japan and the wealth of the United States of America—
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.