They don't have fish

Here's one for the "only in Japan" file. This one happens allllllllll the time and it happened today, twice.

Someone was telling me about the fish that they had eaten. They told me the Japanese name, which is 'maguro.' Immediately everyone started asking each other "How do you say maguro in English?"

Well the Japan reflexes kicked in and a few people, with written-in-stone certainty pointed out "Ha, ha. Oh don't be silly. There's no English word for that. They dont have it over there." ie: only in Japan.

Okay a few problems with this for a variety of reasons, both factual and logical.

1. You don't need a thing within your national borders to have a name for it. Seen a dragon lately? Giant Squid? How about the fact that there's a word for Elephant in Japanese , "Zoh" even though there were never Elephants in Japan (or England for that matter.)

2. We do have a word for that fish, it's called a tuna, and what do you know, Japanese supermarkets are filled with little white cans of things called "canned tuna." Yeah, the Japanese word for tuna is "tuna." Actually it sounds like "tsuna"

3. Most of the fish. shrimp, whales, dolphins etc that are sold here don't come from Japanese territorial waters. This is not some trivia that I discovered at the library. Where I live in Japan is a fishing community and it's common knowledge that the fishing boats go all over the globe for 6 months at a time. I mean, duh, where do you think they go? They're just really slow? So but by that logic, who knows, one could argue that people from my country may even have more of a sense of what the name for that fish is.

It someone asks me "Do you eat ABC fish in your country?" I think it's a fine question. A fine, fine question. But I get irked by the knee jerk need to say "Oh, that's unique to Japan."

Sorry it sounds like I'm ranting but reall, really I'm still keeping true to my original aim: to point out the way Japanese see themselves and the rest of the world.