Well, I was in the hyaku-en shop (100 yen an item, plus tax = 105 yen per item), and I saw this nice cup, then I saw it had ‘Skunk Cabbage’ written on it, so of course I had to buy it. Then I had to find out what the hell a skunk cabbage is. The exact version is here, but an easier version is here.

Basically, it’s a cabbage which smells really bad. So I bought a mug with a picture of one on it. Great.

Original Comments

Comments from the original WordPress blog post.

oli — 2004-05-18

Those words are also both used as slang for a certain drug - skunk being strong, and cabbage being the weaker leaves. Hehehe ;-)

Andrew Shuttleworth — 2004-05-20

If you want to see wild skunk cabbage in Japan I can highly recommend a day trip to Oze:

http://www.andrewshuttleworth.com/shutup/archives/000006.html

http://www.google.co.jp/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%E5%B0%BE%E7%80%AC

Andrew

Andrew Shuttleworth — 2004-05-20

By the way, skunk cabbage is also known as mizubasho in Japanese.

Andrew