I saw one great sign which brought a smile. It was up on the island of Hokkaido. It had printed in large English letters:
"GET YOUR MOTHER'S MILK HERE!"
Below that sentence there was a picture of a cow which looked as much like a combination of an Elephant and a Camel as anything I know. The artist must have been a wonder. Attached to each of the cow's udders were long lines of hose that ran for about ten feet across a big bill-board. At the end of each line of hose was a nipple, like our American baby-nipples. At the end of each nipple there was a man-sized baby pulling away at the nipple. It was one of the funniest advertising signs I ever saw. I watched several Americans look up at it and every one of them laughed aloud. And the funny thing about it was that it was intended to be a serious advertising sign.
* * * * * *
At a banquet given in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo one of the most side-splitting incidents happened unintentionally that ever happened at any banquet anywhere.
One of the sons of a great Japanese business man was speaking. The banquet was in honor of a well-known College President from America who had come to take up work in the Orient. This banquet was to welcome him officially to Japan.
One of the speakers, sitting beside Mr. Uchida, the Foreign Minister, had been a student in America where this man was formerly the college president and he was trying to make the crowd see how happy he was to welcome the president to Japan. He did it in the following language as nearly as I can remember it:
"I feel like a cartoon I see in your peculiar paper—what you call him—Puck? Judge? No—he bin in that peculiar paper, Life? That was he.
"This picture; he shows two dogs talking to each other.
"One dog he a great, what you call him—Coolie? Pug? Yes, he was a Scottish Coolie. The other was a little wee dog; a Pugnacious Dog, I think you call him.