Japan's Provincial Lady

JAPANESE LADY IN EUROPE -- Haruko Ichikawa--Button ($2.50).

The stock picture of a Japanese traveler is an immaculate, youthful-looking, polite, poker-faced Oriental who goes about with a small, expensive camera taking photographs of fortifications, air fields and the like, collects trade secrets, lets nothing escape his foxy eyes, but rarely writes a travel book. Travel books by Japanese women are even rarer. Japanese Lady in Europe, the travel diary of a sort of Japanese Provincial Lady calling herself merely "a chatterbox," fits none of these specifications. Aside from its interest as the work of a Japanese observer, readers will find its pert, oblique commentaries on travel-worn Europe refreshing in their own right. Haruko Ichikawa is a granddaughter of the late Viscount Shibusewa, one of the first Japanese to travel abroad (1866). Her diary covers a year's travel with her husband, English department head of Tokio's Imperial University, on an Albert Kahn Travelling Fellowship.

Readers will find here little confirmation of the notion that temperamentally the Japanese are suited to the English, the Chinese to Americans. To Madame Ichikawa, who claims the Japanese character "is like a peppercorn, small but hot," the English were the least compatible people she found. Students looked "just like asparagus cultivated under glass," so soft and pink that she thought they might be almost edible. Flat-heeled, brown-clad English women all looked like schoolteachers. Under the withering catechism of Author Walter De La Mare, Madame Ichikawa admitted that the only things good about England were "the policeman, cart-horses and Simpson's beef-steak." * The worst example of English bad taste she found in her hotel lavatory, where the toilet-paper was stamped with an advertisement showing "a lovely little child's face." Peering through heavy bars at the British crown in the Tower of London, she wished that she could be in the crown's place looking out at the acquisitive expression on the faces of the onlookers.

As impressive as anybody along the way were the Chinese "of great leisure and extremely strong nerves," who, despite their screaming anti-Japanese" banners everywhere, treated her with unfailing courtesy. Her concluding thought was that the Chinese "seem to be likely to inherit the earth and go on forever, while the Japanese, Italians and other Latin peoples go neurotic and mad, followed by the English. . . ."

The Russians, she decided, for all their stolid appearance, "were far more acute than Englishmen." Except for "the smell peculiar to all things Russian--rotten leather or duck," she found them more attractive than they were painted. Spanish bullfights (where she admired the bulls more than the matadors) were much more interesting than European picture galleries. A Rubens subject was "nauseating because she looked as if she would melt into thick fat if she were squeezed." Another painter gave his girls eyes "like rotting goose-berries." French women were "very fidgety" but she took careful notes on what they could teach Japanese women about coquetry. From Italy she carried away an impression of Fascism "as disagreeable as bones that stick in the teeth." The first requisite for a pleasant tour, says Madame Ichikawa, is to know the words for "thank you" and "lavatory." Much interested in intimate conveniences, from what she could make out in going through historic castles over Europe she "often wondered if such noble personages as Elizabeth and Maria Theresa urinated at all."

In closing, Madame Ichikawa sharply rebukes Japanese diplomats who spend their main energies intriguing instead of learning, like her, the language and ways close at hand.

* Simpson's: A London eating-house.

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