Seaweed for Breakfast

This book was published in 1963, which suggests the travel was undertaken a year or so earlier.

Nina Epton was invited to visit Japan, and undertook an official tour for two weeks as a guest of the Japanese Foreign Office. This gave her a stilted and formal view of Japanese life. She made her own arrangements to stay on, for almost 3 months. Her time after the formal tour was spent with people who responded to an advertisement in the English-language Asahi Evening News, asking whether families would accept her as a guest in return for English conversation lessons.

It was a master stroke really, as it put her in touch with people with enough English to read a newspaper printed in English, but was widely available, and spread throughout the country. She met a huge breadth of people from the inevitable school teachers and businessmen to young entrepreneurs, and of course their families, which gave her access to the housewives who would otherwise have been difficult to contact.

Typically Epton spent only a night or two with each person, and despite offering to pay where it was obvious money was limited, she was treated as a guest, and well looked after. In some of the larger cities she stayed a little longer, but this was often with a school or institution. As well as experiencing family life she was taken places to witness Japanese life at that time, and has made an detailed catalogue of everything she did. This book can be a little dry and times, and I read it in about 5 sections between other books, in order to keep my own interest in it.

There really can be no doubt it is a cultural snapshot of Japanese society in the 1960s, however it is obvious how much this has changed in the intervening fifty-something years! There are some clever predictions and some observant insights, such as:
P10
I not only like, I love raw fish and it is one of the delicacies I miss at home. I am sure that if an enterprising Japanese were to open a sushi bar in London, Paris or New York (playing down the fact that sushi refers to slivers of raw fish spread on small oblongs of vinegared rice until people got used to the idea) he would earn a fortune and the gratitude of many a western gourmet.
I can clearly remember when sushi was introduced into Christchurch, but there is no doubt it has taken the world by storm - it would be impossible to find a shopping centre without at least one sushi offer now days!

4 stars.