Kuwai (a.k.a. water chestnuts)

 

I'm going to cook these today. They're not the freshest I've seen, but the price is very low, so I can't expect them to be the best. (Some stores are more expensive than others, of course.) I got them at my favorite local supermarket, Mama no Mise (Mama's Store), which I'm trying hard to support. I've shopped there off and on for 10 years and they are in grave danger from The Big, which opened a couple of months ago and has better prices.

When I got to the checkout counter, the clerk looked at the package and asked me, "You eat these? You like these?" as if it were a miracle that a Westerner liked something that's unusual in Japan. I guess she doesn't know that you can (and I do) buy canned water chestnuts in any decent supermarket in the U.S. and they're a standard ingredient of Chinese cooking.

I forget the name kuwai every time I leave Japan for a year. Actually, it should be easy to remember. It's very similar to kowaii (scary) and kawaii (cute). But not so similar that I would mix them up. Not like hashi, hashi, and hashi.

Japanese has relatively few phonemes (the basic sounds of a language). Not as few as Hawaiian, which I think has about 12. But Japanese has only 16 consonant sounds and 5 vowels (which can be either long or short), making 26 sounds. English has about 40 or so phonemes. Korean, which has a grammatic structure very similar to Japanese, has well over 50 sounds. (I learned less Korean in my year there than any language I've been exposed to for a month).

Which leads me to the famous story about the famous priest Ikkyu, who had the reputation of being a really clever guy.

One day Ikkyu was walking through town and came to a bridge. A sign on the bridge said, "Do not walk on the bridge." Since relatively few Japanese of Ikkyu's time could read Chinese characters, bridge was written はし, which presumably most Japanese of Ikkyu's time could read or the story makes no sense at all.

Ikkyu walked across the bridge.

People stopped and stared and told him, "No! NO! NO! You'll be punished. You aren't allowed to walk across the hashi (bridge)."

He smiled and said, "It's okay. I didn't walk on the hashi (edge). I walked down the middle."

Hashi can also mean chopsticks. Maybe somebody can invent a story using all three meanings of hashi -- bridge, middle, and chopsticks.