In this book the Golliwog interrupts a boring summer by creating bicycles in which they all go adventuring: they manage to reach Japan for a brief but pleasant visit. 
     It's not clear what we are supposed to think about the little vignette of a Japanese doll lying on its back (on the text page opposite the Golly -as -jinriskisha man picture--click to see the entire page plus two more of Golly in Japan). Perhaps he has fainted at the sight of these dolls and their vigorous antics. Or perhaps the artist had acquired a doll to use as a model and wanted to include a sketch!

Thanks for the images of this book to the Baldwin Collection of the University of Florida Libraries, which is engaged in its own project to put historical children's literature online.

The author created another picture book, A Cup of Tea, focussing on the adventures of Japanese boy dolls, but in this one "my Jap" is "queer ... an' sweet" as is often the case in children's stories.
Click on picture for scans of the entire booklet.

Two illustrations, listed from a French edition in 1888, scanned from an undated  American translation. Both are signed Rossi. The first is placed at the end of the chapter in which Loti announces he has married into a family of puppets, the secord at the end of the entire novel.

See The M.P.'s Daughter for another illustration signed "Rossi."

For more on Madame Chrysanthème, see the page on Japanese dolls in literature.

This book is a typical collection of stories and verses, probably previously published in various children's magazines. None of the stories inside has to do with a Japanese doll. The covers however may have been specially done for the book--two paintings in which a Japanese doll goes from security to peril. Note that he wears shoes--the artist was drawing on memory, not a model, probably.
 

Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Strang were a publishing dynamo, with many books for boys and girls, annuals and collections of stories. This particular book was so poorly made that the first story is missing. None of what remains relates to the doll on the cover.

This is a story in which a collection of ethnic dolls come alive and take a little girl on a world tour. Togo, the Japanese doll, has a lively personality (click for text as well as full illustration)

The Live Dolls books  by Josephine Gates, illustrated by Virginia Keep, were a popular series. None of the "live dolls" (belonging to little girls in a particular village)  was Japanese, but in this book the dolls and their owners visit  Japanese doll-land. 

This is a glimpse of an illustration which appears in different episodes of  two different books. Click on the picture for more!
 

This is a novel centering on a woman's life in the early years of Japan's contact with the West; the main character, the "Japanese doll," is a young woman who becomes a courtesan in order to replenish the family's fortune (a very French, although also very Japanese, plot). For more, see the Mirror of Women page.

There were two illustrators, but this vignette of a doll on the title page is by Haru Kawa.

This tiny book (only 3"square)  is the author/artist's account of her toy collection, including three Japanese dolls. Click on the image for several more pages.

This little book has only a few pages, pictures of dolls with rhyming captions. Someone has used the copy as a coloring book; also, it may have lost some pages. In its current condition, the only Japanese doll is the one on the cover (the back cover is the mirror image of the front), 

The cover, shown here, provides an example of the "multicultural doll family" including a Kewpie with wings (recalling its origins as Cupid), a soldier doll, a little girl doll, an American Indian, and some kind of jointed puppet, as well as the Japanese doll. The dolls inside are mostly blonde dolly types and a rag doll. 

The doll in this story is home-made, though she guides her owner to the land of dolls, Japan.

In this little book, Mary's garden grows with what she wishes for--dolls, of course. The Japanese doll is the only "ethnic" doll in the group.

Scans courtesy of spookaroo ebay auctions.

full-page book illustration, Ruth Hallock

Image of girl taking tea with Japanese doll, illustrating Stevenson's verse "Foreign Children":

You have curious things to eat,
I am fed on proper meat;
You must dwell upon the foam,
But I am safe and live at home.
     Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
     Little frosty Eskimo,
     Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh! don't you wish that you were me?

Drawing for animation, 1935, US 
Walt Disney (artist team, perhaps Grim Natwick) 

Click for more information on this Disney cartoon featuring a Japanese doll.