"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

One time when I was eating at the Japanese­style hotel I was served a round, hard
thing, about the size of an egg yolk, in a cup of some yellow liquid. So far I had eaten
everything in Japan, but this thing frightened me: it was all convoluted, like a brain looks.
When I asked the girl what it was, she replied "kuri." That didn't help much. I figured it
was probably an octopus egg, or something. I ate it, with some trepidation, because I
wanted to be as much in Japan as possible. (I also remembered the word "kuri" as if my
life depended on it ­­ I haven't forgotten it in thirty years:)
The next day I asked a Japanese guy at the conference what this convoluted thing
was. I told him I had found it very difficult to eat. What the hell was "kuri"?
"It means 'chestnut,' " he replied.
Some of the Japanese I had learned had quite an effect. One time, when the bus
was taking a long time to get started, some guy says, "Hey, Feynman! You know
Japanese; tell 'em to get going!"
I said, "Hayaku! Hayaku! Ikimasho! Ikimasho!" ­­ which means, "Let's go! Let's
go! Hurry! Hurry!"
I realized my Japanese was out of control. I had learned these phrases from a
military phrase book, and they must have been very rude, because everyone at the hotel
began to scurry like mice, saying, "Yes, sir! Yes sir!" and the bus left right away.
The meeting in Japan was in two parts: one was in Tokyo, and the other was in
Kyoto. In the bus on the way to Kyoto I told my friend Abraham Pais about the Japanese­
style hotel, and he wanted to try it. We stayed at the Hotel Miyako, which had both
American­style and Japanese­style rooms, and Pais shared a Japanese­style room with
me.
The next morning the young woman taking care of our room fixes the bath, which
was right in our room. Sometime later she returns with a tray to deliver breakfast. I'm
partly dressed. She turns to me and says, politely, "Ohayo, gozai masu," which means,
"Good morning."
Pais is just coming out of the bath, sopping wet and completely nude. She turns to
him and with equal composure says, "Ohayo, gozai masu," and puts the tray down for us.
Pais looks at me and says, "God, are we uncivilized!" We realized that in America
if the maid was delivering breakfast and the guy's standing there, stark naked, there
would be little screams and a big fuss. But in Japan they were completely used to it, and
we felt that they were much more advanced and civilized about those things than we
were.
I had been working at that time on the theory of liquid helium, and had figured
out how the laws of quantum dynamics explain the strange phenomena of super­fluidity. I
was very proud of this achievement, and was going to give a talk about my work at the
Kyoto meeting.
The night before I gave my talk there was a dinner, and the man who sat down
next to me was none other than Professor Onsager, a topnotch expert in solid­state
physics and the problems of liquid helium. He was one of these guys who doesn't say
very much, but any time he said anything, it was significant.
"Well, Feynman," he said in a gruff voice, "I hear you think you have understood
liquid helium."