Rice Cooking in Japan

Abstract

The rice cooker is one of the most globally successful products to have emerged from Japan’s postwar manufacturing sector. It remains popular today, with exports especially to Asian countries continuously expanding in recent decades, even as production and sales in Japan have remained stable during the same period. From the first commercially viable and simple rice-boiling machine in 1956, the rice cooker today has evolved into a state-of-the-art, AI (artificial intelligence)-enabled kitchen equipment with a host of cognitive and technological functions. Not only can current rice cookers cook ‘perfect’ white rice as favoured by the Japanese, they can also make almost every other rice dish as well as soups, meat and vegetable dishes, pasta, breads, cakes, and many others. This paper traces the evolution and major transformations of the rice cooker from its invention in the pre-war period to its development today, and correlates these transformations with shifts in the Japanese diet, especially with regard to rice consumption. While rice is historically considered its most important food, Japan’s attitudes towards it have changed significantly in the past century. Rice consumption rates especially have shifted, as it is now less than half compared to peak levels in the 1960s. Throughout these changes in rice consumption and the Japanese diet, the rice cooker’s functions and roles have diversified accordingly, even as it has developed into a most technically-advanced and inordinately expensive household equipment that continues to be a significant player in Japanese food culture.