ALL THE BEST IN JAPAN.

By SydneyClark ' 12. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1958.305pp. $4-95.

Too many travel guides are geared to lavish spending, obvious "sights" to see, and the sort of lodging and eating that would deny that you ever left New York. Sydney Clark's are of a different and superior kind. All the Best in japan, with Manila, Hong Kong, and Macao, has the further advantage of being informative in an area where catering to the uninformed notions of what is "Japanesey" and mysterious seems to be a special temptation.

Mr. Clark tells you where your electric razor will or will not work, how you may live decently in Kyoto or Tokyo and see what you went there to see without having to buy an interest in Frank Lloyd Wright's fame. He even tells you where the local city water is as clean as your own at home, plus a hundred more practical details considerately set forth, for one's mail is important and laundry will accumulate.

One of the ablest and most necessary chapters, however, for any one who desires to know what it is that he sees, is Chapter V, "The Background of the Picture, or the Story of Japan, a World Puzzle." Tojo and his fellows deliberately played up the enigma for their purposes, and obviously not all customs and attitudes are readily explained any way. Here perhaps Mr. Clark is at his most serviceable, for he distills tactfully for an audience he assumes to be intelligent some of the most scholarly of materials into a simple but accurate resume, well calculated to awaken the sympathetic understanding rather than the "Lookit, Molly, ain't it quaint!" response. There is good advice also in one short series of statements about Tokyo which could save much disappointment and add to the traveler's pleasure. "The primary interest in Tokyo, quite unlike Kyoto and Nara and quite unlike large European capitals, lies in what the city is, not in what it was in times past. As a city of the past, it has relatively little color. As a city of today, immense, ambitious, throbbing with life, replete with fascinating things to do, to eat, to watch, to experience, it has few equals in the world." Look elsewhere for the ancient, sleepy country villages with thatched roots and a cuckoo singing in the cryptomerias across the brook. These do exist, thank God, but not in Tokyo.

All the Best in Japan is very well conceived, richly packed with desirable information, and easily presented.