At a time when the world was once again on the verge of war, thirty-three nations came together for the 1939 New York World's Fair at a site a mere twelve miles from Midtown Manhattan, to ‘demonstrate how tools, processes and knowledge of today can create a better World of Tomorrow.’ Like the next significant New York fair, in 1964-1965, it was established and run as a fundamentally commercial operation and was held over into a second year with the hope of recouping costs and returning a profit. Centrally-positioned in this international exchange of cultures, technologies, and ideas was Japan, America's third-largest trading partner, with its enormous country pavilion, reputedly modelled after the famous Grand Shrine of Ise, serving as a performance space in which the complex relationship between the two countries was displayed and acted out. This chapter will consider how the pavilion and its exhibits, carefully stage-managed by the Japanese firm Nippon Kōbō, which by 1939 functioned as a ‘state directed propaganda organ’ (Germer 2011, pp. 4-5), as well as the performance of Japan's Takarazuka Revue on the fairgrounds, reflected how Japan projected its culture to American fairgoers. The pavilion offered multiple sites of performance, fundamentally gendered spaces that foregrounded the charm, industriousness, and artistic skills of kimono-clad women, while the Revue sought to present another, more modern vision of Japan. Thus, the story is equally about Japanese self-representation and American reception, one made more complex by the imperial government's tight control over content at a time when the country was being transformed into a war machine run by a de-facto military dictatorship.