TIL the Japanese never ate salmon sushi until the 1980s when a Norwegian businessman, hired by Norway's government to offload excess salmon, made a deal with a Japanese company to sell the fish in its grocery stores, leading to its popularity today.

This comment was posted to reddit on Oct 03, 2018 at 9:22 am and was deleted within 10 hour(s) and 42 minutes.

TIL the Japanese never ate salmon sushi until the 1980s when a Norwegian businessman, hired by Norway's government to offload excess salmon, made a deal with a Japanese company to sell the fish in its grocery stores, leading to its popularity today.

This is just silly, reminds me of a similar case of language-based bureaucracy in Wales that I noticed a few years ago.

Wales is bilingual, they officially speak Welsh and English.

This means all road signs are in both languages.

Normally, the English name for the Welsh place is just Englishised rather than directly translated (e.g. Conwy in Welsh just become Conway in English)

There used to be a Welsh town called Y Fali. This means something like "I fell" in English but sounds like "Valley" when pronounced in Welsh. So the English just called it Valley for years, despite the absence of any actual valleys in the area.

The Welsh eventually modernised, and renamed the town as Dyffryn, which does mean Valley in Welsh.

There were some protests from locals at the time, as it was seen as the English bastardising Welsh words again, but then nobody could confirm why the place was called Y Fali in the first place, so Dyffryn stuck.

/r/todayilearned Thread Link - npr.org

TIL the Japanese never ate salmon sushi until the 1980s when a Norwegian businessman, hired by Norway's government to offload excess salmon, made a deal with a Japanese company to sell the fish in its grocery stores, leading to its popularity today.

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