Since I am visiting home for the holidays, I was thinking of cooking some Japanese food for my folks. I know how to cook basic yakitori, but do any of the resident cooks have any advice on tsukune, nankotsu, etc.? Also I would appreciate tare recipies.
I’m not a chef (or even a decent cook) so I have no recipes for you but I wanted to say that the mention of yakitori brought back some happy memories of being in Japan when I was in the service back in the 1980’s. My image of Japanese food was of the very high-end variety. You know, those fancy places that cost a fortune. Seeing their depiction in the movies or T.V. sort of put me off Japanese food. But I found that the inexpensive food like yakitori and yakisoba was very much to my taste. To this non-cook, it would seem hard to screw up yakitori. Cut up some boneless chicken into small pieces, marinate in soy sauce, stick onto skewers, and put on the barbeque. Japanese shish kebob!
I know how to do basic yakitori, that’s why I asked about tsukune and nankotsu.
I thought I knew a bit about Japanese food and culture, but you just proved me wrong! 
I searched for nankotsu and found this page: bento.com listings ; it doesn’t have recipes but does list different types of yakitori dishes.
Also, my 2 cents: in America, most “yakitori” is skinless. During my last visit to Singapore, I found a yakitori stand in a hawker mart and they cooked it with skin on. Unlike the sloppy greasiness one usually associates with chicken skin, this had been grilled until light and somewhat crispy, and it was a perfect complement to the rest of the meat. If you can do it properly, I recommend doing your yakitori like that! (The above website called this style “shouniku” incidentally.)
Good luck cooking, Dave!
P.S. Search for “nankotsu” in a search engine and all kinds of sites come up…