Frances Kramer

The Traveling Sketchbook: an American Kid Discovers Japan Frances Kramer First edition

This book is based on my childhood experiences in 1950s Japan. Japan has changed enormously since those postwar days of poverty. Anne, the heroine, encounters this along with her discoveries of beautiful gardens. Would an American child moving to Japan with her family discover the same things that Anne discovered? Certainly some of the opposites Anne encountered are still very true. The Japanese do many things differently from us. However, other things have changed. No average American household could afford to hire servants in Japan today. But if a Japanese child from a middle-income family were to come to this country, she would be amazed to discover that her family could afford to live in a huge house with a beautiful lawn! She would discover a new freedom making friends the American way. Her ways of looking at the world would be expanded. That is the point of the book. When I first started this book around 1989 there were no books for children that I could find on the subject of an American child integrating into a foreign culture. There were plenty on the subject of a foreign child trying to adjust to the American culture.