ABSTRACT
In 1937, a member of the Diet, Tsurumi Yūsuke, visited Australia to attend a series of events as a Japanese representative for the international congress on education. This gave his children, Kazuko, 19, and Shunsuke, 15, an opportunity to experience their first overseas travel. This chapter examines the significance of the visit upon the siblings, who became important intellectuals in their adulthood, Kazuko a sociologist and Shunsuke a philosopher, focusing on how the exchange of ideas with people from Australia and other countries was expressed in their work. Kazuko’s experience found expression in her first tanka collection, published in 1939, and Shunsuke’s experience in Adelaide inspired him to write his seminal work, Ame no Uzume den (The Life of Ame no Uzume 1991) half a century later.
