On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 19:02:30 +0900, Eric Takabayashi
<etakajp@yahoo.co.jp> belched the alphabet and kept on going with:

>Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson wrote:
>
>> I was watching Go-gai last night and they covered the problems of
>> gaigins leaving grafitti all over ancient monuments. Before you all
>> get het up, it was Gapanese gaigins in Europe scribbling ganji on the
>> Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.
>>
>> They then did a regular bit of testing the average
>> person-in-the-Tokyo-street's general knowledge of Japanese thingies.
>> This time it was to write all the names of the 6 (?) prefectures in
>> Kyushu on a map of said island. Out of about 80-or-so people, they
>> showed two people presented with the map asking if it really was a bit
>> of Japan. The second of these two idiots had a go, starting from the
>> NW clockwise with Tokushima-ken, Kita-kyushu-ken, Hataka-ken,
>> Kobe-ken...
>
>Ask Japanese in any language if the name of the prefecture is "Ibaraki"
>or "Ibaragi". Not even NHK or other late night news seem to be able to
>make up their mind.

My experience has been that people who actually live there call it
"Ibaraki", while those from other places are split on the subject.





--

Michael Cash



"There was a time, Mr. Cash, when I believed you must be the most useless
thing in the world. But that was before I read a Microsoft help file."

                                Prof. Ernest T. Bass
                                Mount Pilot College


http://www.sunfield.ne.jp/~mike/