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Miss Kagawa is by the artist Iwamura Shōkensai and her kimono crest is the katabami (wood sorrel).
Unusual among the Japanese Friendship Dolls, Miss Kagawa retains a complete record of the various states and locations she visited in early 1928 before her final placement at the North Carolina State Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Also unusual is the fact that at the outbreak of the war between Japan and the United States in 1941, Miss Kagawa was not immediately removed from display. Instead, she was repositioned with her facing the back corner of her glass display cabinet, with an explanatory placard captioned: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” And explaining that she would return to her normal place of honor once the hostilities had ended and peace was restored between the two nations. The only other doll to have remained on display during the opening years of the war was “Miss Hiroshima” at the Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland.
Miss Kagawa would return briefly to Japan in 1988 to be take part in the large exhibition of 19 Friendship Dolls organized by the Kokusai Bunka Kyōkai (Japanese International Culture Association), Sogo Department Store and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper in Tokyo.
She is missing some of her accessories and her original display stand.