ALL THE BEST IN JAPAN AND THE ORIENT INCLUDING HONG KONG, MACAO, TAIWAN AND THE PHILIPPINES.

By Sydney Clark '12. NewYork: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1964. 401 pp.$5.95.

Was it Tertulian who said: "Let the faithful pluck the pilgrim in the Year of Jubilee"? A similar aspiration stirs in the breast of the lucky city in any Olympiad. Tokyo is no exception, and neither are her sisters of Osaka and Kyoto in 1964.

Sydney Clark has added to his long series of travel books, All the Best in Portugal etc., a revised All the Best in Japan and theOrient only six years after his excellent first edition of 1958. Obviously he is willing to make his honest penny in a Jubilee Year, but the service he offers now warrants the timely revision and bringing his information up to date. The changes wrought in Japan during the past six years have been accelerating. The last year itself has seen more changes than the achievements of all the previous five years put together.

Hotels, huge ones, have sprung from the ground like mushrooms around a stump. Some are simple hostelries and some, like the Okura in Tokyo, have the telephone in the bathroom with an extension beside the bed.

Roads: This is literally a devastating subject while it goes on. This morning's JapanTimes (April 18, 1964) says they are supposed to be finished by August. I beg to doubt it, but some of the results are already beginning to show. In 1961 I "made certain" of attending a plane departure at Haneda Airport, twelve miles south of Tokyo at 9:00 A.M. by starting at 6:00. We reached Haneda at 9:05 in time to watch the takeoff run. In March 1964 when I revisited Tokyo via Haneda Airport, the new elevated toll road put me down at the hotel in Tokyo in just 22 minutes.

A revision of Clark's 1958 guide book was clearly in order, and nearly every item will be useful to someone, whether it is the voltage of electric razor outlets or the lurking places of the mixed and nudist public baths. The specific information has generally been verified with his usual care. I could wish, however, that he would resist the temptation to include incidental nonsense like that on page 89 where he doesn't "recall seeing men bow deeply to women." They do not bow deeply to women so often as women bow deeply to men, but the drab fact is that one sees this deep male bowing to women in every railway station at any hour of the day. This goes for airports too, of course, and one regrets the negation for its uselessness as well as its exaggerated invitation to wonderment.

Sydney Clark has produced one more excellent travelers' guide book in his long series. Possibly it is the best. His information is informed by pertinent history and laden with helpful details of daily importance to the traveler. Clearly he is on the side of the pilgrims to the Orient in 1964.

Professor of Biography

(This review was written in andmailed, from Japan. - Ed.)