Space Cowboy wrote:

So specifically what are these two characters
konbu,kobu,katakana,hiragana. I saw them on a Japanese tin in the
Sasha thread in January.

Now I'm not quite sure what you mean so I hope this makes sense.

Your first word (which you called "Chinese") would also be the Japanese word
for "kelp" written in Kanji and, according to my dictionary at least, can
be pronounced as both "kobu" and "konbu". No idea which pronunciation is
more common.

Your second line would be the Hiragana for "kobu" (without that stray "chi"
at the end ;-).

To expand on what "Thitherflit" wrote: the Kanji version of the Wikipedia
article about "konbu" is just a redirect to the Katakana spelling. The
article generally uses the Katakana spelling (konbu) and the Kanji in
parantheses in the first line.

Like Thitherflit said, the situation is reversed for "konbucha" which seems
to be mostly spelt in Kanji. To further confuse you I looked it up in a
very popular Japanese online dictionary (the site is in Japanese) and it
lists the Kanji and transliterates it only to the Hiragana "kobucha"
(without the "n").

Not sure if any of this is useful to you though ;-).

HTH,
Stefan