Kuri is chestnut.  We eat chestnut also....    But I do like to see some cultural exchange ideas.  I was just thinking about the sushi culture in the U.S. (too many cheap sushi places in California at least...  cheap, at the expense of quality....  I mean, if I am feeling bad, I want to indulge myself with sushi, but I don't want to eat low quality sushi that makes me feel disappointed!  If I don't have money, I could eat cheaper food, not sushi.  And sushi must be made by skilled chefs!  Don't cheapen the food and waste tuna on mushy yucky badly done rice... (blue fin tuna is endangered, btw, I blame it on over fishing due to too many cheap sushi restaurants to cater general public.  Sushi isn't meant for everyday consumption....  It's delicacy).

I eat sushi nearly every day though and usually the stuff I can get from convenience stores or the supermarket for less than the equivalent of five dollars. I do have to say the average cheap sushi here tastes better than what I have in the US, but that's probably because it's in higher demand over here so they have more incentive to compete on taste.

I was thinking of translating kuri as chestnut, because that's what I'd learned. Then the editor in me made me look it up and I saw that the type I know seems to be native to Japan and Korea only, so I hesitated to translate it that way. I've never had chestnuts from other regions, I wonder what the difference is?

I was thinking of translating kuri as chestnut, because that's what I'd learned. Then the editor in me made me look it up and I saw that the type I know seems to be native to Japan and Korea only, so I hesitated to translate it that way. I've never had chestnuts from other regions, I wonder what the difference is?

Might be more complicated - seems there's hakuri, kasakuri, kuriken, mikuri, siba-kuri and torakuri chestnut cultivars. In England we call them sweet chestnuts and they're also used in cooking and sometimes roasted by the fire - well, that mostly happens in Charles Dickens' books

http://www.ct.gov/caes/lib/caes/documents/publications/fact_sheets/plant_pathology_and_ecology/a_-_z_named_chestnut_cultivars.pdf

hmm interesting. Waiting for another dose of contemporary Japan. While on the subject, can you tell us what the gen Y think about the royal family? Do they know who the current king is and sorts?

Hmmm, I guess this wouldn't be so much politics as it is history. Well, I can't give you much of a consensus on what the thoughts are on the royal family, because it varies as much as it might be on any other public figure, but the general image I have is one of my respect and interest. If the Emperor and his family do anything, I find I am interested in it slightly more. Though the current crown prince set for succession is kind of a goofy guy and it kind of feels like...never mind, I shoudn't go there.

Of course I know who the current Emperor, crown princes and princesses are. You can find tabloid stories about them running all the time. I never read tabloids, but they have advertisements for the new issues that hang from the ceiling on trains with big red letters ("The young princess is being bullied at school! See the shocking news and how her mother is handling it!" and so on and so forth). I was recently quite touched by Princess Takamado's speech (she's not the daughter of the current emperor, but rather the wife of the son of the Taisho Emperor) at the assembly for the decision of Olympic Games, and it seems I wasn't the only one. I remember many years ago when a new member of the royal family was born, you could stand in line to get a chance to see them at the old royal police in Kyoto and my parents made me go with them; I was excited about seeing real royalty in person, but it was boring for a kid to wait so long, so I played Gameboy most of the time. And of course with the earthquake two years ago, they were pretty instrumental in helping drum up hope and morale for the victims.

I say we sing a song dedicated to kuri....

There is a song dedicated to kuri? O.o

I see the things are same in Japan as in the commonwealths as far as royalty goes. But, we definitely don't hear much of it outside Japan. Even on the face of a far reaching tragedy as Fukushima, we heard only a perfunctory note of address from the royalty there. Royalty of Great Britain are on the other hand a much beloved tabloid subjects for the rest of the world and therefore receives certain media coverage on other fronts too.  But then again, apart from the usual notoriety and decadence, they hardly express their views

on anything.

On an unrelated segment, could you be kind enough to point me to the right direction, on how the hell do you write any Japanese script properly by pen & paper? I tried learning Hiragana and it is absolutely maddening. I could never get the curves right or the slashes long enough. It seems quite counterproductive to look out for every damned speck of a slash with its miniscule lengths ending at different heights for each & every time you write a syllable. Surely, it can't be a day to day practice to write with such accuracy like for example the grocery list. How does a regular Japanese learn to write?

Sounds like a topic I could make for a blog post: "How I Learned to Relax and Love the Hiragana." I'll give it a good thinkthrough and perhaps make a post on it in the near future.

in this global world really how much is different between developed countries... every country seems to influence others with it's culture...

even in a way export them... in the form of Movies and show.... You probably can get a warped sense of a countries history even from these things... and to the point where there is a sphere of cultural influence around these countries....