Tag Archives: Mikado Dining Car

Corrections & Additions: Details on the train ride

Information cardsThe correction: The train trip that produced the wonderful little graphics featured here yesterday was in September 1936, rather than 1937, according to several letters written by Professor Carey D. Miller during and after the trip.

The addition: Three more of those wonderful advertising cards, including the one shown here, turned up yesterday as I made another pass through several file folders of miscellaneous materials. I’ve added them to yesterday’s image gallery. Just click on the image to see all twelve images. Hopefully, a helpful reader will step forward with quick translations of the latest three.

The handwritten letters from Professor Miller fill in the background of the flyers and the trip.

The first letter is dated September 11, 1936, “Enroute Morioka-Tokyo”, written on stationary of the Sapporo Grand Hotel.

We are returning from a 2 day visit to Sapporo in Hokaido where we went to see the university and experimental work they are doing & to see the type of country as compared with the southern part that we shall see later. We haven’t been here a week yet but feel that we have seen quite a bit of Japan.

Miller was traveling to Morioka and then on to Tokyo.

She went on to describe the little information cards.

I thought you and the other girls who read Japanese might be entertained with these little slips that the girls from the dining car handed out to us on the way to Sapporo from Hakodate. I think they are very artistic & even if we couldn’t read them we managed to get some good.

Miller wrote another note after arriving in Tokyo.

We had a thrilling time in Morioka. Mrs. Sugino took us out to a country village. We met a number of interesting people & many fascinating things we could not have seen without the entries which her work and acquaintances there afforded.

I previously had posted photographs Miller took while in Furudate Village near Morioka, mistakenly dated 1937. Now I’ll have to go back and correct the dates based on this additional information.

Wonderful art from a 1937 train ride in Japan

Back in December 2011, I posted a batch of photos taken by UH Professor Carey D. Miller during a 1937, pre-WWII trip to Japan.

Miller, the internationally-known nutritionist who established the Home Economics Department at the University of Hawaii, traveled to Japan to meet with colleagues and observe farming and cooking techniques.

[text]Now I’ve found some other mementos from that trip while sorting my mother’s papers after her death at the end of January. These seem to be a series of ads about dining options on the Mikado Dining Car while traveling by train through Japan.

These are small, no more than 3×5, printed on fragile paper with wonderful art work.

I’ll have to await comments from readers who can translate from the Japanese for a more accurate assessment of what these represent.

–> See the collection of 1937 Japan train memorabilia.