Baikingu: How Kirk Douglas Accidentally Named Every Buffet in Japan

In 1957 the president of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, Tetsuzo Inumaru, toured Europe and came home wanting to open Japan's first Scandinavian-style buffet. There was one problem: the actual name for it, smorgasbord, is close to unpronounceable in Japanese and does not survive contact with katakana with any dignity intact.

Then, purely by luck, a swashbuckling Kirk Douglas epic called The Vikings opened at a cinema around the corner from the hotel and became the biggest thing in Tokyo that summer. Inumaru noticed everyone already had Scandinavia on the brain, made the connection to his still-unnamed restaurant, and opened it in 1958 as "Imperial Viking".

It worked. Too well, really — within a few years バイキング had stopped being a restaurant's brand name and become the generic Japanese word for any all-you-can-eat spread, the way "Hoover" became vacuuming in British English. Nobody involved in that decision was thinking about ninth-century Scandinavian raiders. They were thinking about a movie poster.

The word never went anywhere. Hotels still run 朝食バイキング every morning, family restaurants run seasonal ケーキバイキング (cake buffets), and yakiniku places advertise 食べ放題バイキング without a flicker of irony. Smorgasbord, meanwhile, quietly died even in English, which means the losing word actually won in the end — just under someone else's flag, on the other side of the planet.