Eleanor Roosevelt was well-known as the "First Lady of the World" before her first visit to Japan, a six week tour in May and June, 1953. As the wife of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, she had greeted high-level Japanese visitors during the early White House years before Pearl Harbor, 1933-1941. After Pearl Harbor, she inspected U.S. hospitals and bases in the Southwest Pacific and helped to welcome and to entertain Nationalist Chinese allies in the war against Japan. After the president's death in April 1945, she not only continued her daily syndicated newspaper column, "My Day," which appeared in many American newspapers since 1936, but entered a period of years devoted to civil rights. During the Truman administration, she served as an American delegate in the General Assembly of the United Nations and, as chair of the Human Rights Commission, was instrumental in securing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948. She was tireless in advocating equal treatment of African Americans and the equality of men and women in her own country and abroad.

This period in her public life coincided with the postwar Occupations of Japan and Germany. Eleanor Roosevelt was featured in Japanese women's magazines, as were other famous American women, such as Pearl Buck and Helen Keller. In 1950, she met a distinguished group of Japanese women leaders who had been specially selected with the help of the Women's Bureau, MacArthur's Headquarters in Japan, to travel to the United States. The purpose was not only to further democracy by viewing key U.S. institutions but to form lasting bonds of respect and friendship with Americans. Great Britain ran a similar program to assist the return of Japan to what the wartime allies considered to be the realm of civilized nations.

After the Eisenhower administration came to power in January 1953, Republicans took over appointments to the United Nations, and Eleanor Roosevelt returned to journalism and private human rights activities, including the American Association for the Untied Nations. It was at this time that a newly founded US-Japan friendship group, centered at Columbia University and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, solicited her interest in Japan and persuaded her to visit the country. It was a carefully arranged journey and reflects early Cold War cultural politics. Although the Occupation had ended and Japan had recently regained its sovereignty under the peace and security treaties, American leaders wanted to ensure that Japan remained securely in the American Pacific orbit. This included all levels of U.S.-Japan relations--economic, political, military, and cultural. The State Department and Embassy were eager to send American musicians, writers, educators, scholars, and athletes who would represent the best in American attainments and impress the Japanese. The Japanese side in planning Roosevelt's trip consisted of key cultural and intellectual figures who would later establish the International House of Japan and were also assisted by funds from the Rockefeller Foundation. American figures who came to Japan in the early and mid 1950s included baseball hero Joe DiMaggio and his new movie star wife, Marilyn Monroe; contralto Marion Anderson; violinist Isaac Stern; and Nobel/Pulitzer Prize novelist William Faulkner.

Apart from Cold War cultural politics, Eleanor Roosevelt was also very much her own person in Japan and was true to her personal concerns and causes. Before the trip, she met Ichikawa Fusae, a preeminent Japanese women's leader who had been newly restored to political life following a much-contested purge and invited to the United States. Roosevelt brought along her one of her daughters-in-law and a secretary. While in Japan, she continued to write her column, "My Day," and sent letters to her chief benefactor at Columbia, Dean Henry Carman. Japan's mass circulation newspaper, Mainichi Daily News, ran the column for the duration of her stay. As to be expected, she met high-level figures in Tokyo, including the American Ambassdor to Japan. She had a formal audience with the Emperor and Empress a cherished visit with Princess Chichibu. But she also saw other parts of Japan: Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, and Hiroshima. She tried to learn more about rural women in the fields and factory women in the mills. In speaking to students at universities, she confronted questions about the decision to drop the atomic bomb. She had time for temples and shrine and for Kabuki. She received petitions from wives of still imprisoned Japanese prisoners of war pleading for clemency. Especially embarrassing were formal complaints about the GI bar and brothel military culture in Japan. Roosevelt refrained from public comments but forwarded petitions to the American embassy with expressions of interest or concern. She was interviewed by a leading Japanese woman author who was also editor of an important women's magazine, Fujin koron (Women's Central Review). In Tokyo, at the Imperial Hotel, her path crossed that of singer Marion Anderson, a reminder of the incident in 1940 when the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Anderson, an African American, the right to sing in Constitution Hall and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to arrange a much larger concert on the Mall.

Roosevelt's interpreter on the trip was journalist Matsuoka Yoko, fluent in English. She had been a member of the fledgling Japan America Student Conference and graduated from Swarthmore College in 1939. During the Occupation period, Matsuoka shifted to a more radical vision of democracy and published her experiences in 1952 as Daughter of the Pacific. Only one incident seemed to mar the Roosevelt visit to Japan. When she was leaving the Ministry of Labor in May, she was briefly accosted by a group of Japanese women protesters who were led by an American communist expatriate, Hanna X, married to a Japanese. This she tried gracefully to deflect as unimportant in the overall tour.

Subsequently, Eleanor Roosevelt's biographers have not accorded this and other visits to Asia the significance they deserve. Roosevelt herself wrote about India, Pakistan, and the Middle East and included her visit to Japan in her autobiography and other works on her post-White House life and experiences, drawing extensively from "My Day" columns and contemporary correspondence. For researchers, there is still more to glean from her personal papers at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York, and National Archives records, College Park, MD. On a personal level, Eleanor Roosevelt returned to Japan for a short private visit in May 1955 and once again met her new friends in Tokyo. One of her last protests as a world citizen was against the denial by the State Department of a visa to visit "Red China" in 1957. In 1961, she was once again appointed to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations, this time by President John F. Kennedy, who also selected her to head the Commission on the Status of Women.