Re: Wikipedia's "List of English words of Japanese origin"

Shez <UseReplyAddress@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> dixit:

>The story goes that shortly after Japan was opened up to the rest of the
>world, one of the first refrigerated ships docked at Nagasaki. A smart
>lad from the Satsuma region crated up some plums and loaded them onto
>the ship. If there was any documentation with the shipment, it got lost,
>so when these crates arrived in Australia, there was nothing to identify
>them but incomprehensible "chicken tracks" on their sides together with
>one word in Romaji: Satsuma. So the dockers broke open a crate and
>decided that "Satsuma" was the Japanese word for those delicious plums.

Presumably the ship stopped in America first, in 1886, having taken
32 years on the trip.

--
Jim Breen http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Computer Science & Software Engineering,
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia
ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学
.