Honored samurai, ruthless ronin, wayward vagabonds, shadowy ninja and helpless villagers... welcome.
I’ve spent nearly half my life in Japan now (24 years since 1999, plus nine months on YFU and a college summer), I’m married, have kids and like many of my fellow immigrants, live in the less urban areas (small cities) or even outright countryside. I’ve done many things that a lot of tourists or culture enthusiasts have on their bucket lists (shopped on Takeshita Street in Harajuku, met friends at Shibuya Station’s Hachikou, visited Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, etc.), and these are all great and fun, but there are things you don’t think about until you have to actually experience them. One was having my new car blessed by a Shinto priest (yeah, I need to write that up) AT the shrine, and today’s topic, which might seem a tad pedestrian in some senses, but can be categorized under Hmmm, I Didn’t Know That and I Never Would Have Thought of It. Rice Polishing (cleaning).
Rice. The Japanese choice of carbohydrate consumption. (See Japan Living Guide’s informative page What to Know about Japanese Rice: Buying, Storing & More.) With exception, they have it at every meal, and when eating abroad, the first thing many Japanese visitors think to themselves: This needs more rice.
So how do they ready it at home? While it can be bought at stores that will polish it for you (so all you have to do is cook it), those of who live in or close to farming communities, or who farm it themselves, need to polish (clean) the rice before cooking it. In the past, this was a very, very time consuming activity. Fortunately for the modern samurai, there’s the automated rice polisher!
Surprisingly easy to use — there are only four steps — it only takes about ten minutes to polish a 30kg bag of rice that will feed a family of four for about a month.
Four easy steps to rice the way you like it.
Insert coins. (It costs 300 yen for a 30kg bag.)
Dump in rice.
Press button for how you want your rice polished (Well-polished rice, Standard, Half-Grain, and 80% Grain (brown rice)
Receive polished rice.
Standard is how we like our rice, so I put in the money...
Dump in the rice...
Press the Standard option button (the machine starts milling away and with about a minute or so, I can start)...
collecting the rice...
All done. That simple. And boy, weren’t you excited!? Life comes to you! Here’s a look at other types of rice polishers from the Japan Course webpage.
We don’t talk about food or much about how it’s grown or prepared in fiction. Quite honestly, with exception, I think it would be as boring as describing someone using the toilet would be disgusting. It’s something we skip for the sake of both our sanity as authors and that of the readers. In my latest finished short story, “The Lightning Gods” (which is still in submission with a publisher, so I have no deets for you), a future rice farming community (a vil-op, village coop) is fighting for its literal life as urban-based mercenaries raid their crops using drones. Elements of the story are from headlines today — global warming, rice crop theft (NO JOKE!), and drones. It’s realworld-based cyberpunk/scifi. I hope to be able to share it with you all soon.
We Never Meet Without Parting
Next issue... Review of Star Wars: Visions season 2. Review of Ooku: The Inner Chambers later on in the year.
Until then!
Made in DNA
https://campsite.bio/madeindna
I was in India about five years ago and saw small-scale farmers using baskets to toss rice into the air so the wind would blow the chaff away. "Time consuming" seems about right.
Automatic rice cleaners on the side of the road by a field seems like something quintessentially Japanese.