Important Discovery for Snack Lovers

Today I was talking to one of the secretaries about rice crackers - called sembei and / or okaki (I'm not sure of the difference - I get different answers depending on who I ask). I mentioned last month that my favorite is kuromame sembei - black bean crackers. Another favorite is the mixes like in this bag. Sometimes the mix will have peanuts, various small rice crackers, even tiny dried fish. So I described it and asked what it was.

"They are friends of alcohol" she said, meaning they are something that is normally eaten while drinking. "Tomodachi no arukoru" I said and she smiled. That's good, I've been calling them Japanese Beer Snacks. The real name is Kawakimono.

This leads to one of my pet peeves. None of my dictionaries consistently list all the same words if you go from Japanese to English and then English to Japanese. For example, I knew that a word for friends is tomodachi. I decided to look it up just now to make sure of the spelling. When I looked up friend on the English side it listed yuujin, mikata, etc. but no tomo (tomo is singular - tomodachi is plural). But when I looked up tomo on the Japanese side it says friend. I especially dislike it when my electronic dictionary does this since it seems like it would be easy to have consistent linked words.

Only an engineer, or maybe an English teacher, would spend time considering something like this. I guess it is harmless entertainment though.