Ichiro and Toshiko are like boys and girls all around the world—they love games and toys and fun. Ichiro plays baseball and Toshiko likes dolls. Many of the things they do are exactly what American boys and girls on the other side of the world find delightful, too.

But Japan has differences—fascinating ones—and THE FIRST BOOK OF JAPAN tells about them. It takes the reader to the little island country of rice paddies and cherry blossoms, where the Japanese have worked our their own pattern of everyday living. Here the reader visits a Japanese home and learns how Japanese families live, how they furnish their houses, how they have made a beautiful ceremony out of tea drinking and an art of flower arranging.

Then, wandering about the countryside, the reader attends gay little festivals, celebrates the national holidays, watches the people at their work, learns scores of entrancing things about the colorful little country where tradition thousands of years old is so curiously intermingled with things as up-to-date as zippers and big factories.

This lively introduction to a delightful land of surprises is written by an author who knows the country well, and is illustrated by Kathleen Elgin's just-right drawings.

Phyllis Whitney, author and critic, says of THE FIRST BOOK OF JAPAN, "Having spent my own childhood years in Japan, I can vouch for accuracy of Miss Mears' picture. But she has given us the new Japan as well as the old, and that is important since its problems concern all of us who look with hope toward peace in a free world."

From the dust jacket