TRAVELS IN MANCHURIA AND MONGOLIA, by Akiko Yosano, translated by Joshua A. Fogel. New York: Columbia University Press, 164 pp., with a map, $39.50 (cloth), $16 (paper)

In 1928, the celebrated poet Akiko Yosano was invited to travel through Northeast Asia by the South Manchurian Railway Company.

This quasi-governmental organization often issued such invitations to famous folk, not only as a means of publicizing the railway itself but also as a way of validating Japanese military adventures in Manchuria.

The largest coup was Japan's most famous author, Soseki Natsume, who had been induced to take to the rails in 1909 and publish the results. Aware that he was being used for political purposes, the author of "Botchan" turned jocular, as a ploy to distance himself from his subject matter, and in the end exposed the whole set-up.

Writing about the rigors of even first-class rail travel, he said he decided to go on with his journal because "if I didn't reach Harbin, it would look bad."

Yosano, though writing at a time when Japan's expansionist ambitions were even more evident, sometimes seems carefully unaware. As the translator of her journal writes: "(She) never mentions that all the extraordinary courtesies she and her husband received during their weeks in Manchuria and Mongolia might in any way influence what she was writing about Japanese activities there."

At times her comments seem purposely naive. Delighted at having found an acquaintance in a position of some power within the company, she marvels at the "good relations" he has contrived between Japan and Manchuria. And in a gracious reference to her hosts, "I was happy to see the sagacious manner in which the South Manchurian Railway Company assigned the right man to the right place."

At other times she is more astute. "When I consider the Sino-Japanese issue . . . I imagine that Japan will end up isolated from the world, and it saddens me." When soldiers (Koreans recruited by the Japanese military) are billeted in their hotel, she writes that "imperialism and the smell of liquor (were) incompatible with our desire to write poems about . . . willow catkins."

This is what she and her husband often did -- view something local and then pen a verse. Both were, after all, poets -- she now much more famous than he was -- and her poetry as well as her presence was what the railroad was paying for.

In addition to being conventionally poetic, her journal also sometimes becomes commonly genteel: "We appreciated that the maids all preserved the humility of respectable young women and had nothing of the air of waitresses about them."

Though given the subtitle "A Feminist Poet from Japan Encounters Prewar China," there is little in this journal to indicate what we now know as feminism, and little of what Yosano herself once demonstrated years before, when her brother was at Port Arthur during the Russo-Japanese War and she wrote poems urging him not to die for his country. Reprimanded for her lack of patriotism, she replied that women everywhere have always hated war.

Now, traveling first-class, her feminist concerns seem fewer. She finds herself "delighted to the point of tears to find that women of such elegance (as a certain Mrs. Wu) in war-torn China still existed." Listening to a railway director, she notes that "one point he made -- about the difficulty faced by Japanese women born and raised in Manchuria in finding husbands -- struck me as particularly melancholy."

Not only is there little forthright feminism, there is also a certain tone that signals acceptance of received ideas about the sexes. One of the reasons for the society-column sound of the journal is, to be sure, that she was not alone and so wrote in the plural, a form that always lends a suggestion of the spurious: "We much enjoyed the landscape" seems not only less personal but also less honest than "I liked the view."

Another reason for the shallowness of many of the observations was that, as a professional writer, she knew what her audience would expect -- well-bred reactions to the new territories. Yet another reason was that while writing she knew that the Japanese military was looking over her shoulder.

Many Japanese authors had visited China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- among them Katai Tayama, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki and Haruo Sato -- and many had met with other Chinese writers.

By 1928, however, with Sino-Japanese tensions high, such meetings were impossible, and cultured Japanese travelers had to content themselves with a genteel tone, a safe antiquarianism and writing poems about willow catkins.

Perhaps for that very reason, this book, ably translated by Joshua Fogel, author of "The Literature of Travel in the Japanese Rediscovery of China, 1862-1945," is important. It was written by a major poet and gives an insight into the dilemma of a sensitive and individual writer in circumstances where she could not write freely.