To the Editor of the "Norta-Cuina Dairy News."
Sir—In view of the holiday season, and the fact that many of us are unfortunate enough to have to send our families away, and remain behind ourselves, would it be possible for us to solicit on their behalf a little more courtesy, and a little less red tape from Japanese officials stationed at Manchurian health resorts? What is the use of the S. M. R. advertising the beauties of those resorts, when, sending our families there, we find from their letters they are subjected to "bumbledom,"' in its worst form?
Being a "grass widower," letters have received from my family all point to these petty annoyances. Every little package of baggage opened, and duty charged if possible, every letter slit open, why are those who do succumb to the (in these dog-days) tantalizing advis. treated to such behaviour from Japanese officials? The presumption is that they do want this tourist trade to bring a little extra cash into their pockets, and in fact that would appear to be their sole idea, but unaccompanied by the vaunted politeness and courtesy, which we used to associate with Nippon.
I was asked to mail a few pairs of shoe laces and innocently enclose ed them in an envelope to send by letter post. Do you think the Japanese Post Office here would accept that letter? Not a bit of it, the only way in which it was possible in their minds to send those laces, worth about one dollar, and weighing perhaps four ounces, was by filling in a Customs declaration, and sending them by parcels post.
And then that mail as a whole, what a thing to be proud of, two days for a letter from Dairen to Port Arthur, and that correspondence which has to be so rigorously censored, just fancy the fellings of those wives to whom we send our dutiful love (and assurances that in their absence we are leading the straight and narrow life, and in bed by nine each night) when they know it has all been first exposed to the unpoetical eye of a Post Office official.
Why are all these things? Perhaps the local Japanese Chamber of Commerce can inform us.
I am, ete,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.