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Comment by getoj | Hacker News Reader

This has been folk knowledge in Japan for thousands of years. Rice paddies are traditionally planted in places with a propensity to lightning storms, a fact so well known that it reduces land values in suburbs built on old paddy land (there are other downsides to that land, but this is one).

Also, the word for "thunder" (雷) is written as "rain" (雨) over a "rice paddy" (田), and the word for "lightning" (稲妻) is "rice plant's (稲) wife (妻)".

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On mobile, but they also nailed lightning helping mushrooms grow.

https://phys.org/news/2010-04-lightning-mushrooms.amp

Amazing. Here’s a newer research that unveiled the cause is cuts and scratches inside https://api.intechopen.com/chapter/pdf-download/62393

Hey, do you know about what scent is used in mineral water in Japan. Our friend gave us some last year and we were amazed how primal and fresh it smelled, trying to trace it all the time.

From the description it could be petrichor, but we had this similar smell once coming off ocean island once (Kawau, NZ) so we not sure

Curious to know what mineral water you are speaking about

Nice! And speaking of etymology, my favourite trivia from the article: The word was coined from Greek petros, meaning "stone", and ichor, meaning "the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods". I always wondered what the second half meant.

I'm usually a lurker and rarely comment but yours was such a nice little informal comment that I had to say something. Thanks for bringing a smile to my face :)

Off topic but do you have a resource for your second paragraph? I find this etymology fascinating!

Not sure if this is what you had in mind, but, for example:

rain - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/雨

field - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/田

thunder - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/雷

rice - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/稲

wife - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/妻

lightning - http://nihongo.monash.edu/cgi-bin/wwwjdic?1MDJ%B0%F0%BA%CA

Those would probably be more helpful as Wiktionary links:

rain - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/雨

field - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/田

thunder - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/雷

Note that the "glyph origin" section describes 雷 as an ancient simplification of the phono-semantic compound 靁, where 畾 indicates the pronunciation. Any relation to rice paddies is probably a post-hoc rationalization.

rice - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/稲

wife - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/妻

lightning - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/稲妻

This is actually common, folks think Kanji are random strokes, but they tell stories and tend to make sense. Understanding the relations makes it easy to remember.

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