Want a taste of Canada while in Japan? According to Ambassador Leonard Edwards, all you have to do is dig into a plate of pasta, bite into a sandwich or use canola oil in your cooking.
Canada provides 100 percent of the durum wheat that goes into almost all Japanese-made pasta, 50 percent of the wheat that goes into local white bread and about 80 percent of the canola seeds that go into Japanese canola oil.
"The identity of Canada is kind of buried in the products which are served as Japanese products in many places," Edwards said, noting that Canada also contributes significantly to such Japanese dishes as sushi and "soba" buckwheat noodles. Canada has a 24 percent share of the local market for sushi-topping surf clam, 0.7 percent of tuna and accounts for about 5 percent of the market for buckwheat.