But then again I guess it does matter to people who know/care about the difference. It reminds me of the time when my American friends went around calling miso soup as just “miso”…

“You drink that stuff!?”

That is interesting. The commercial seems to indicate that the Japanese adapted the 外来語　of the name of the fruit from American English and not British English, though I think that would be due mainly for historical/shortness (in katakana) reasons.

(Edit: My electric dictionary for clarification! It lists the terms for kiwi in Japanese first for the birds found in New Zealand and then as the bottom entry, clarifying the “kiwi = ~fruit”. As in most conversational languages, dictionaries are not always followed.)

thus it is acceptable to change the spelling to the local variant?

Of course it is. Unless Nihon, Turkiye, or Deutschland have suddenly become the norm.

POINT!!

Just to be clear, this isn’t about US-vs-non-US English but about correct names. So I am not sure how many revisions there really would be.

I figured it was, since you took issue with my citing an *American* English dictionary.

New Zealanders may have coined the term “kiwifruit,” but in my experience growing up on the east coast of the United States, the fruit was almost always called “kiwi.” You might not regard it as correct, but it has found its way into American English dictionaries as an acceptable term for kiwifruit.

Just to be clear, this isn’t about US-vs-non-US English but about correct names. So I am not sure how many revisions there really would be.

The Japanese are also calling them in various way like Q-we, kee-uh-E, and such. Our Engrish is different. The Japanese has much serious problem on calling kiwifruit properly.

I suggest you join the “Its kiwifruit not kiwi” facebook group and mobilize them in a grand effort to force American dictionaries to remove their fruity definitions of “kiwi.”

My daughter attends an international school in Tokyo. While it’s an American foundation, they allow parents to choose if their children are to be taught American or British spellings and so on.

That’s a good way of accommodating the international variations in accent and spelling patterns.

It might also offend you to hear that American English teachers in Japan tell school children to pronounce the letter Z as zee.

Precisely.

The kiwifruit, often shortened to kiwi, is the edible berry of a cultivar group of the woody vine Actinidia deliciosa and hybrids between this and other species in the genus Actinidia. The Actinidia is native to South of China.

-Wikipedia

and

ki·wi (kw)
n. pl. ki·wis

1. Any of several flightless birds of the genus Apteryx native to New Zealand, having vestigial wings and a long slender bill. Also called apteryx.
2. Informal A New Zealander.
3. A kiwifruit.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language

Where I’m from we use “kiwi” when referring to the fruit, so I wrote it that way in the headline. (with the hope of also getting search engine traffic from people who want to see videos of New Zealanders and birds ripping their heads in half)