The television program that Sally Draper watches while on a sleepover is The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964); the actor she admires is the star of the show, David McCallum.
Roger's negative, WWII-based reaction to the prospect of doing business with a Japanese company is a reference to Jerry Della Femina's seminal 1970 memoir about the 1960s advertising industry, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising War, which was a major influence on "Mad Men." Della Femina's book title came from a meeting he had at his agency in which he and his colleagues were discussing possible taglines for their Panasonic account, and he jokingly came up with "Panasonic: From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor."
Pete Campbell tells Don Draper that the meeting with the Honda executives was a "Margaret Dumont" sized disaster. Margaret Dumont (1882-1965) was a large actress who played the buffoonish foil in seven Marx Brothers comedies. Using a haughty voice, with ladylike civility and apparently clueless to all of Groucho Marx's better satirical lines, Dumont added a comedic version of social stability to Marx Brothers comedies, while Groucho, Chico and Harpo trashed her expensive high society parties, a ship's stateroom and an opera. Groucho always credited her for adding to the comedy, and she was sometimes called the fifth Marx brother.
The Japanese actors hired for this episode were taken aback when the director, Lesli Linka Glatter, started conversing with them in their native language. Glatter had lived in Japan for several years and is fluent in Japanese.
Despite Roger's refusal to consider doing business with the Japanese company Honda, he never once, in the entire series, complains about Burt Cooper's obsession with all things Japanese.