I was feeling a little curious, so I looked up the origin of the word “viking” (as in the Japanese word for buffet “baikingu” or バイキング)...

Apparently it was started when the Teikoku Hotel offered up its first buffet… They put out a call for suggestions within the company, and a few people wrote in saying that such a buffet reminded them of the feast scene in the Kirk Douglas movie “The Vikings“... Such an association was apparently common among Japanese people at the time, so the feasts were a huge hit and the name stuck.

(Source: Some random website)

What a boring explanation! I mean, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I hoped it would be better than the name of some movie…

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 12:46 am and is filed under Japan, Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.