[floatl][/floatl]Asahi: Son of POW wants to be top dog at Koshien
A son of a former German prisoner of war is stepping up to the plate where his father struck out 74 years ago--selling hot dogs to Japanese baseball fans at Koshien Stadium. Hermann Wolschke, a meat-processing meister, hawked his hot dogs in November 1934, when Babe Ruth starred in a Japan-U.S. exhibition game at the famed ballpark in Nishinomiya, Hyogo Prefecture. Many spectators, however, ate only the bread and threw away the sausage. The Sultan of Swat may have loved hot dogs, but a large majority of Japanese were unfamiliar with the meat. Now, Wolschke's namesake second son is bringing back the father's original recipe when a renovated Koshien Stadium opens Saturday...Wolschke's father served as a cook for the German navy during World War I. He and other German soldiers were captured in Tsingtao, China, by the Imperial Japanese Army and detained as prisoners of war in Hiroshima and other Japanese cities. The father, who decided to stay in Japan after the end of the war, first settled in Yokohama and then moved to Kobe following the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake...more...

Interesting story..

article wrote:.. but a large majority of Japanese were unfamiliar with the meat.

Isn't everyone 'unfamiliar' with the meat?

GJ

Damn, I wished I still lived in Kyoto (not really). There's ABSOLUTELY nothing worse at a baseball game than not being able to get a good hot dog.

OK, that's not true. There's nothing worse at baseball game than having the lead off man slap a single in the first and then watching helplessly as the number two guy lays down a sacrafice bunt... but that's a different matter all together.

Here's hoping the hot dog guy is successful!!

Here is a picture of German POWs in Nagoya:



More here

In speaking of food, baseball, and the Hanshin Tigers, it would seem that KFC is opening a store inside Koshien (in Japanese), home of the Tigers. It is well known that a statue of Colonel Sanders was pulled from an outlet in downtown Osaka and tossed into the Dotonbori canal by rambunctious fans following the Tigers Japan Series victory in 1985. The statue was never retrieved from the murky bog - a certain curse, many fans thought, that lead to the long lapse between the next title (2003). The store opens on Saturday. The Colonel will sport a happi coat and megaphone.

Mainichi: Rare pictures from WWI POW camp show the birth of sausages in Japan

[floatl][/floatl]Rare pictures of German prisoners of war from World War I showing the Japanese how to produce sausages have been discovered. Takashi Chiba, 37, a museum curator at the Kasumigaura-shi Kyodo Shiryokan in Ibaraki Prefecture, found the pictures in June while he was researching Yoshifusa Iida, a Japanese government official who was said to have spread sausage manufacturing methods across Japan. The 10 pictures from 1918 show German soldiers, who were detained at the Narashino prison camp in then Ninomiya (present-day Narashino) in Chiba Prefecture, butchering pigs and smoking pork to make sausages...more...