Pine Bluff daily graphic., 1907-04-23
American Citizens Who Left Home When Three Weeks Old Gets Odd Impressions Life Far Different
FROM THAT OF JAPAN
Visitor Finds Himself in Many Pe- culiar Positions Owing to New Gus toms-Diiicrence in Banks--Lcarns First Lesson.

Tacoma, Wash, April 22.-Picture an American citizen who has never seen his native country. Picture, in other words, a man born in the United States and taken to the Orient when three weeks of age, where @e passes through his boyhood days, is educated, and attains the age of ? years.
 Then the man, an American citizen, comes to this country and views his home for the first time. After lear2- ing his mother tongue abroad, finding opportunity to converse in it only upon rare occasions, and using the language of the Orentals in all busl- ness and in most social affairs, he finds himself in strange new world, country different from all he has known, and yet the country to which he owes his allegiance.
 Such has been the novel experience of George c. Gibbs, wbo has spent the past month in Tacoma and Seattle, the first cities he has visited since coming to the United States from his home at Yokohama, Japan.
 Although educated, trained in busi- ness affairs and we'll versed in the worlds development as learned through newspapers and magazines, M.. Gibbs has found the cities of Ta- coma and Seattle veritable fairy lands as compared with the cities of the Orient where his life has been spent.
 Learns His First Lesson.
 How is this country different, what strikes you as the most peculiar?' IS the question which Mir. Gibbs is re- peatedly asked to answer.
 You see have a new pair of shoes on,' answered Mir. Gibbs. Well, that is indicative of lesson l have learn ed. Following the Japanese custol, I set my shoes outside the hotel door last night before I retired, expecting to see them cleaned and shining wh en I arose this morning. Instead of be-
  them and I had to send out for another pair before I could leave the room. In Japan we depend upon servants for everything: here we have to work for ourselves.
 II blushed like 10-year-old school boy when a white girl. a waitress, came 10 take my order in a restaur- ant. It certainly did seem strange, although I guess it was all right. l never saw white man working in the streets or doing menial labor. Of course. you people are used to it. it gave me something to think about
 II never dreamed that so much ma chinery could be gotten in sing e building as I saw in a brewery in Seattle soon after my arrival in this country. But that was not circum- stance to some of the big power houses and factories I saw later.
 T have been jostled about on the streets, run into and nearly run owe" and have missed a hundred street ca"S while becoming educated in the ways of this country l walk more in a day here than I did in week in Japan In the first place, people do not go o' the streets much there. Instead C hustling business, as they do in Taco ma, they wait for it to come to then in Japan. Then we have the rick shaws to carry us whenever we go out We travel on the streets because W have no sidewalks. When someone i in our way he gets to one side an makes room for us. We get on tn left side of a street car. In passin two conveyances, each take the lei instead of the right, as here.
 T see school chlrden going hom at 2:30 o'clock in the afternoon, an sigh to think of how We had to re main in school from o'clock in tn morning to F and from i to , o'clOc every day.
 New and Strange Flowers.
 T was attracted by the many flow CTS had never seen before on displa in a florists window, and ordered basket. l rendered him $1 in paymeI and he laughed and told me to giI him s3 more. In Japan a basket { flowers like that, only of different V, rieties, could have been bought for cents.
 n0h to ma orC, funny. I never saw one before tn month. I looked at tall buildings Ii my neck hurt, and I had been jostl' off the sidewalk many times. Fart quakes prevent our buildings from b