Rice Instead of Gold – The Currency of the Samurai, the Shogun’s Rice Exchange, and the Sacred Ritual of Emperors

Rice Instead of Gold – the currency of the samurai, the pillar of the shogunate’s finances, and the axis of Japanese everyday life. The history of Japan told through koku, the Rice Exchange in Dōjima, imperial rituals, and what actually ended up in the bowls of Edo’s inhabitants.

The Land of Young Rice Ears

If in Japan you ask someone “Have you eaten rice?” – gohan tabeta? – you are in fact asking: “Have you eaten a meal today?” In Japanese, gohan means both “cooked rice” and simply “food”, while the raw grain appears as the modest kome or, with a polite prefix, okome – “honourable rice”, in the same line as o-cha (tea) and o-sake (rice alcohol). A single, seemingly banal character, 米, contains an entire world: from the kanji in the official name of the United States (Beikoku – “the country of rice”) to the old poetic designations of Japan as mizuho no kuni – “the land of young rice ears”. This was not a decorative metaphor. When, in the Yayoi period, the first seeds of wet rice arrived on Kyushu from the continent, together with them came new tools, new forms of cooperation, a new kind of power based on the control of water and harvest. Japan was born as a civilisation of flooded fields, terraced tanada, communal labour yui and cautious harmony wa – long before the word “samurai” ever appeared.

A few centuries later, the very same grain became the measure of the entire Tokugawa world. Instead of counting wealth in gold, Edo counted it in rice: one koku – around 180 litres of grain, enough to feed one person for a year – became the unit in which the power of domains, the salaries of samurai, and the burden of peasant taxes were expressed. The kokudaka system functioned like a state credit rating: your recorded number of koku on paper determined whether you were a great daimyo “of a million koku” or a provincial petty lord; how many warriors you had to field, how much rice you had to collect as nengu from villages that grew rice but ate barley, because rice was currency, not food. A samurai rarely saw his allotment in the form of actual sacks of grain – he received the right to a portion of the tax, “paper” rice, which he then sold for cash through intermediaries. In Osaka, the “kitchen of the country”, where boats with tax rice flowed into the kurayashiki warehouses, an entire caste of brokers and the Rice Exchange in Dōjima arose. There, on low stools amid piles of sacks, rice turned into warehouse receipts, collateral, credit; in 1730 the shogunate legalised trade not only in grain “here and now”, but also in rice recorded in the ledgers for the future – nobemai contracts, the first futures contracts in history. A single crop failure, a single panic in Dōjima, a single mistake in price policy could shake everything: from the samurai budget to the peasant’s bowl in the mountains of Shinshū.

And then came the twentieth century and global capitalism – and it turned out that rice was still above all… a nerve. The state locked it in an iron grip of food control laws, guaranteed prices and planting limits; the countryside received overrepresentation in parliament and became one of the political bases of the LDP; international GATT and Uruguay Round negotiations slowly chipped away at the wall of the import ban, right up to the story of frozen sushi from California, which had to be classified as a “fish product” in order to legally enter the country of “honourable rice”. At the same time, in the memory of living people there still lingered images of post-war hunger and queues for a meagre portion of grain, so self-sufficiency in rice remained for many a kind of psychological shelter – “as long as our fields bear, the world will not collapse”. In today’s article, we will try to look at the most important element of Japanese culture – rice.

What Does the Character for Rice Teach Us?

The first step in understanding the Japanese relationship with rice is… to look at the character. Small, deceptively simple, one of those that children learn very early: 米. On paper it looks like a little star that someone has grabbed by the legs and pulled downward. In the oldest forms of this character, it was literally a drawing of an ear of grain or a handful of scattered grains flying in all directions – a pictogram of hulled rice grains.

To this day 米 is a separate kanji meaning “rice” (kome), but also an entire radical – the rice key – which appears in dozens of other characters, usually on the left-hand side, in a slimmed-down form. When you see those characteristic “twisted grains” on the left, you can guess that somewhere in the background it is about grain, stickiness, food, or something that grows from the field and ends up in the bowl.

In Japanese, 米 has several readings. The most “domestic” is the kun’yomi kome – raw rice in grains, the kind you pour into a bowl, rinse and only then cook. With the polite prefix o- it becomes okome – “honourable rice”, because food in Japan very often receives an honorific prefix: ocha (tea), omochi (rice cake), o-sake (rice alcohol). This is not a whimsical flourish of politeness – it is a linguistic trace of respect for the grain that for centuries decided who would survive the winter.

The second important word is gohan. This is where a bit of magic begins. Gohan is “cooked rice”… but at the same time simply a “meal”. In practice, everything is decided by context. If someone asks: “gohan tabeta?” – “have you eaten rice?”, they are in fact asking whether you have had lunch or dinner, not necessarily with rice. From the same root come the everyday names of meals:

asagohan – breakfast,
hirugohan – lunch,
bangohan – dinner.

All of them literally mean “morning rice”, “midday rice”, “evening rice”. The language suggests that without a bowl of rice the meal is not “complete”.

Alongside kome and gohan there is the even more “down-to-earth” meshi. This is also “rice”, but as “grub” – in colloquial language, often male, soldierly: meshi wo kuu – “to wolf down rice / to wolf down grub”, “to gobble”. This gap between the elevated gohan and the rough meshi beautifully shows how the same product lives simultaneously in the sphere of the sacred and in the prose of everyday life.

Rice, however, does not end with a single character. The kanji 稲 (ine) means the rice plant – the one standing in the water, in the field, before anyone even thinks of a bowl on the table. On the left we see the radical 禾 – a “cereal plant”, on the right a composite element that historically grew out of the old character 稻. In practice, to a Japanese ear ine is precisely rice “still in the realm of nature”. Only when ine is cut, dried and hulled does it become kome, and after cooking – gohan. One species, three different worlds: field, storehouse, table.

If we look into the glossary of more specific terms, we can see how precisely the language follows the successive incarnations of the grain. Shinmai is “new rice”, the first harvest of a given year – resonating not only with questions of taste, but also with old thanksgiving rituals for the crop. Genmai – literally “dark rice” – is unpolished grain, with the husk still on, today valued as healthier, but formerly more often associated with the food of the “lower classes”. Mochigome is a variety of particularly sticky rice used to make mochi, sekihan and many sweets. Mugi gohan, in turn, is a mixture of rice and barley (mugi), which for long periods was the basis of the everyday diet of ordinary people – we will return to this thread when we debunk the stereotype of Edo “feasting on white rice”.

Language does not just describe the product – it also maps the world. A good example are the old poetic names of Japan itself. In the mythological descriptions in "Kojiki" and "Nihon shoki" there appears the term mizuho no kuni – “the land of fresh, abundant rice ears”. Mizuho (瑞穂／水穂) are precisely young, juicy ears, full of sap, ready to fill with grain. In other variants we encounter the full, beautiful, elaborate Toyoashihara no mizuho no kuni – “the luxuriant reed plains of the land of abundant fresh ears”. In this name of the country there is no “sun”, no “emperor”, no “islands” – there is earth, water, reeds and rice. This is no accident: for the authors of these texts, Japan is above all arable space, a moist plain on which ears ripen.

Things become interesting also when the Japanese look at other countries through the prism of rice. The United States is often written with the kanji 米国 – beikoku. Literally: “the country of rice”. Today’s explanation is fairly technical: it is an abbreviation of the old Chinese ateji 亜米利加 (America), in which the character 米 had a phonetic function (“mei/bei” ≈ “mer-”). But dictionaries also record an older, now obsolete semantic layer in which 米国 could simply mean “a country rich in rice” – any region of abundance. The irony of fate is that ultimately it is the USA, the country of wheat, corn and steaks, that becomes in Japanese writing “the land of rice”. (Note: if you know "美国", that is, “beautiful country” – that is the Chinese / Korean version.)

This small play of characters reveals something important: for the Japanese imagination rice is so central that it becomes a natural axis of comparison. For us, the metaphor of abundance is, for example, milk and honey. In Japanese, the same role of metaphorical wealth (but also of a foundation) is often played precisely by rice – something so fundamental that only its absence makes one realise how much depends on it.

The Distant History of Rice

Now that we know how rice is written in kanji, it is time to ask: where did it actually come from in Japan?

For most of the Jōmon period – that distant era of “paleo-Japan” from around 14,000 to 300 BCE – the inhabitants of the archipelago lived primarily from hunting, fishing, and gathering. They ate chestnuts, acorns, nuts, wild plants, fish and meat, sometimes cultivated plants on a small scale, but there was not yet anything resembling the later “rice civilisation”. The earliest traces of rice itself are grain impressions in ceramics from the late Jōmon – fragments of vessels with preserved “imprints” left by grains have been found, among other places, in Shimane Prefecture, dated to around the 11th century BCE. These are still not rice fields, but rather individual seeds that arrived together with contacts from the continent.

The real revolution begins only when the Yayoi people enter the stage. Today’s radiocarbon research suggests that wet rice cultivation reached northern Kyushu sometime between the 10th and 9th centuries BCE, together with migrants and technology from the southern Korean Peninsula and the lower Yangtze. This is the moment that Japanese archaeologists increasingly treat as the true beginning of the Yayoi period: not so much a new type of pottery as a new grain and a completely different idea of life.

Interestingly, archaeobotany suggests that this did not happen evenly. In many settlements in the middle Yayoi, rice played a key ritual and prestige role – for example as sacrificial food – but the daily diet still relied partly on other plants and hunting. This is important, because it corrects the simple image of a “sudden turn to agriculture”: for a long time Japan is a mosaic – in one place wet rice and bronze dōtaku bells, elsewhere still forest, wild nuts, and Jōmon pottery.

The new technology, however, brings something that did not exist before: a landscape created specifically for a single plant. Terrace agriculture requires the land to be levelled, surrounded by embankments, and flooded with water. On the plains, large, geometric plots appear; on mountain slopes begins what we now call tanada – terraced fields cut into the hillsides literally layer by layer. Historical sources mention tanada at least since the Heian period (9th century CE), and some terraces – such as Kamimomi or Inabuchi – have their beginnings as far as 1,300 years back. Such fields are sometimes called “Japanese pyramids”: thousands of small stone walls built over generations to hold water where people needed it.

Wet rice agriculture has one feature that will shape the entire social history of Japan: no one can manage it alone. You have to dig canals together, build embankments together, regulate the flow of water together – if someone higher up lets in too much, the neighbour downstream will see their entire crop washed away. That is why, from the earliest times, informal cooperation groups appear around the fields: communities that would later be called yui – “to bind, to connect”. Shared labour at planting and harvest, exchange of manpower, jointly maintained irrigation systems – all of this took the form of a moral obligation rather than a purely economic transaction.

This is also where something is born that many contemporary analyses call shudan ishiki – “group consciousness” (more about it here: “The ‘I’ is wide and can hold much – shūdan ishiki and the Japanese way of being together): the conviction that the individual is immersed in a network of mutual dependencies, and survival depends on harmony, wa. In a culture in which people lived for centuries literally at the end of a shared canal, “not quarrelling with your neighbours” was a matter not only of character but of survival. Contemporary Japanese behaviours – avoiding open conflict, seeking consensus, sensitivity to context – are seen by many researchers as a distant echo of those wet, muddy fields.

Control over water and the yield from terraced fields very quickly also becomes political control. In Yayoi settlements we see growing differentiation: larger houses, granaries, graves with richer grave goods – traces that someone managed the irrigation system, decided when to open a sluice, when to hold back water. Over time, entire small “polities” grow out of such villages – like the legendary Yamatai – in which the authority of the chief rests on three things at once: military strength, a network of religious rituals around the harvest, and the ability to organise labour for rice cultivation.

Seen from a bird’s-eye view, the picture is quite simple, yet highly evocative: between the late Jōmon and the classic Yayoi, Japan travels the path from a forest full of gatherers and hunters to an archipelago cut by a network of canals, embankments, and rectangles of fields. Along with rice from the continent comes not only a new grain, but a complete package: technologies, forms of work organisation, and a type of power based on managing the environment. That is why, when later texts call Japan mizuho no kuni – “the land of young rice ears” – it is not just a poetic metaphor. It is a fairly literal description of what the world looked like when the Japanese state was born.

Rice and Ritual Japan

If we look at Japanese festivals, court rituals, and the language of everyday gestures at the table, it quickly becomes clear that rice has never been just “food”. At the very centre stands the emperor – not only as the political head of state, but as someone who for centuries has fulfilled the role of priest responsible for the harvest. Once a year Niinamesai is held – the festival of “the first harvested rice”, in which the emperor offers thanks to the kami for that year’s crops and symbolically consumes the first grains himself. Upon accession to the throne, the new ruler performs the even more solemn Daijōsai – a nocturnal ritual during which, in specially erected pavilions, he offers freshly harvested rice from selected fields to the imperial ancestors, with Amaterasu at their head. Importantly, this is not just a distant past: since the time of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito), a symbolic rice plot has been cultivated within the grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, which was later tended by Akihito and is now by Naruhito – he himself plants and harvests the ears before they reach the altar. For a state that has proclaimed the separation of religion and politics in its constitution, this gesture is surprisingly archaic: it is a reminder that Japanese statehood grows out of land flooded with water.

On the level of the kami, the closest to rice stands Inari Ōkami – one of the most beloved figures of Shintō. Inari is the deity of rice, crops, tea, sake, fertility, and broadly understood prosperity; his name can literally be read as “bringing rice”, and since the 8th century he has been worshipped on Mount Inari in Fushimi near Kyoto. Over time, Inari also became the patron of merchants, artisans, and smiths – in the Edo period his cult spread across the entire country, and today it is estimated that over one-third of all Shintō shrines in Japan are dedicated precisely to him. The characteristic white foxes (kitsune – more about them here: "Foxfires" in Old Edo – A Nocturnal Gathering of Kitsune in Hiroshige’s Ukiyo-e), which we see at the gates of Inari-jinja, are not separate deities but messengers of the rice kami – spirits guarding fields and storehouses. In old stories there appears a scene in which foxes run at night among the ears of rice, and peasants leave them fried tofu and red rice as offerings; gratitude that the harvest succeeded mingles here with a slight fear of the invisible.

The sacredness of rice is also clearly visible in festive cuisine. The classic “good luck” dish is sekihan – sticky rice cooked with red adzuki beans, from which it takes on a pinkish, sometimes almost ruby hue. It is served at the birth of a child, on birthdays, when passing an exam, at weddings, but also in some regions… at funerals. In Japanese culture, red has long been regarded as a colour with apotropaic power – warding off evil spirits, attracting good fortune – so red rice became an edible amulet. It is no coincidence that this very duo – rice + red – returns obsessively in dishes associated with “crossing a threshold”: entering a new year, a new life, a new stage.

When New Year comes, kagami mochi appear in every home – two round discs of pressed rice, stacked one on top of the other, sometimes crowned with a bitter orange daidai. The name kagami – “mirror” – refers to one of the three imperial regalia, and the shape itself is meant to symbolise the sun and the moon, yin and yang, a pair of complementary principles. Kagami mochi are both decoration and offering: they are set out for the toshigami – the New Year deities that bring good fortune to the household – and after a few days they are broken and eaten, as if to say: “that which is divine becomes part of our bodies”.

Even the language of everyday polite formulas carries traces of this rice sacrality. Before eating, Japanese people say itadakimasu – “I humbly receive”, a phrase originally derived from the context of offerings to the kami and receiving good things “from above”. After the meal comes gochisō-sama deshita – “it was a true feast” – addressed not only to the cook but, implicitly, to all beings and forces that contributed to the grain reaching the bowl. In traditional etiquette, children are taught not to leave a single grain of rice – this is not only a matter of good manners, but also of the old experience that every grain is part of a larger gift, for which earth, water, neighbours, kami, and the emperor have all laboured. It is still like this today – if a child is full, they may possibly leave vegetables or meat – but not rice (which is why kids often “hide” uneaten rice in unfinished soup so that the rice bowl is empty).

Rice as Currency in the Early Modern Economy of the Edo Shogunate

In the economy of the Tokugawa era everything begins with one seemingly simple unit: koku (石). One koku is roughly 180 litres of rice – approximately as much as is needed to feed an adult for a year. This is not just a curiosity and a neat conversion, but the absolute foundation of the entire economy of sakoku (closed Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate in the 17th–19th centuries – early modern Japan).

Instead of counting wealth in gold or silver, Edo-period Japan measured the world in rice: land revenues, political position, military strength, samurai stipends. The amount of koku “carried on the shoulders” of a given domain (han) was called kokudaka. Only from 10,000 koku upwards could a landowner style himself daimyo; the largest domain, Kaga, was proudly referred to as “the domain of one million koku”.

In practice, kokudaka was not an exact measurement of how much rice was actually harvested, grain by grain, but an estimated productivity of the land calculated on the basis of large-scale land surveys, soil quality, irrigation systems, and average yields. It was something like a state-issued “credit rating” for a domain. A daimyo’s kokudaka determined his place in the hierarchy at Edo Castle, the number of soldiers he had to field, and the scale of taxes imposed. The basic land tax, nengu, collected from peasants in rice, could reach 40–50% of the harvest, and in some regions even more. It was from this tax rice that the court in Edo, castle garrisons, and domain administrations lived – and from it that further expansion of the irrigation system was financed, a system meant to produce… even more rice.

In this arrangement the samurai appears less as a romantic warrior and more as a salaried official on a rice payroll. Formally, his income was expressed in koku – for example 300 or 500 koku a year – but in practice he rarely received sacks of grain at home. Rather, he was granted the right to a portion of the tax from specific villages, or a “paper” rice allotment that had to be sold for coins through brokers. In this way a characteristic tension of the era emerged: rice as abstract wealth recorded in registers versus rice as something that actually lands in a bowl. Peasants produced the “honourable grain” – okome – but after paying nengu they often had to “stretch” their diet with barley, millet, or wild greens. The samurai saw his “500 koku” on paper, but if the exchange rate between rice and coin fell, his purchasing power shrank. It was a system in which a single crop failure, a single mistake in monetary policy, or a single move by speculators could shake the entire chain – from the palace in Edo to a poor village in the mountains.

In this world Osaka played a key role – a port at the mouth of the Yodo River, looking out onto the Seto Inland Sea. It was not for nothing that it gained the nickname tenka no daidokoro – “the kitchen of the realm”. This is where tax rice from hundreds of domains flowed, where the great domain storehouses, kurayashiki, were built, in which grain belonging to particular han was stored and put up for sale. One can say Osaka was a vast logistical and financial hub: on one side barges with rice arriving from the provinces, on the other merchants from Edo and other cities, who expected steady supplies. For all this to function, a group of specialised intermediaries arose – rice brokers and fudasashi, who combined the roles of wholesalers, brokers, and bankers.

It was at their desks – or more precisely, on their low stools in crowded warehouses – that rice began to change from a “commodity” into a financial instrument. Daimyo or samurai no longer had to “dump” physical grain onto the market. It was enough to issue kome-daka in the form of warehouse receipts, papers promising the delivery of a specified amount of rice from the kurayashiki. These papers could be sold, exchanged, pledged. Rice became collateral – security for loans, the basis for issuing something that begins to look dangerously similar to today’s fiat currencies without backing.

Out of this ferment grew what many financial historians today call the world’s first futures exchange – the Rice Exchange in Dōjima (堂島米市場). Its roots go back to the late 17th century, when the famous merchant Yodoya established a rice market by the Yodoya Bridge, later moved to the Dōjima district on the river. In 1697 the market received an official licence, and in 1730 the Tokugawa shogunate of Yoshimune went a step further: it legalised not only trade in current rice (the first spot market in Japan), but also transactions in future rice, recorded in the ledgers – nobemai (and thus we have futures contracts – under the shogunate!). From that moment on, Dōjima operated with a strikingly modern infrastructure: a membership system, a clearing house, standardised contracts.

What did this look like in practice? Imagine you are a daimyo from a domain in Tōhoku. You know that in half a year a certain amount of your tax rice will arrive in Osaka. Instead of waiting for the physical delivery, you can sell that “rice of the future” today – conclude a nobemai contract for a specified quantity and quality of grain, with a delivery date several months ahead. A merchant from Osaka or Edo assumes the risk of crop failure and price changes, and you immediately receive funds (in coins) with which you can pay your samurai or public works. If prices rise, the broker profits; if they fall, he loses. It came to the point that without a single grain being poured, the rice papers themselves circulated among brokers, changing owners many times before anything was actually taken out of the warehouse.

The key was that Dōjima began to function as a national rice price index. The prices at which transactions were concluded in Osaka were not a local curiosity – they became a reference point for the entire country. Prices from Dōjima were transmitted to Edo and other cities by couriers and even by flag signals along the coast. One could say that in an era without the Internet, Binance, or Bloomberg, Dōjima was an “analogue terminal” on which the exchange rate between rice and coin depended, and thus the real value of samurai incomes, the ability of domains to service their debts, the stability of the shogunate’s budget. In turn, this meant that any major crop failure, any rumour of broker manipulation, and any sudden price drop could trigger not only panic on the market but also hunger riots – to which we shall return.

In this way, under the Tokugawa, a peculiar, very Japanese capitalism emerged: a world in which grain from the field becomes a financial indicator, a currency, an underlying asset for futures contracts and collateral for credit. And at the same time it remains, all along, the very same grain that a peasant must plant, water, and cut, hoping that after paying the levy something will remain for his own little bowl. The Edo economy is thus painfully concrete and at the same time abstract: between the mud of the terraced fields and the elegant paper of Dōjima stretches a long, rice-based chain of dependencies in which a single drought or a single speculative bubble could set the entire system swinging.

Rice on Japanese Tables?

If we imagine Edo-period Japan only through the lens of today’s photos of white, gleaming rice in a bowl, we do that era a serious disservice. One of the most persistent myths goes: “Japan has always lived on white rice.” In reality, for most of history it was quite the opposite.

Polished, snow-white rice – hakumai – was for a long time a luxury. In the Edo period, it was eaten regularly mainly by wealthy inhabitants of large cities (Edo, Osaka, Kyoto), the more affluent townspeople, and part of the samurai class; the court and higher officials treated it almost as a status symbol. For a vast part of the rural population, everyday life meant genmai (unpolished, “brown” rice) or mixtures of rice with other grains: barley (mugi), millet, sorghum. In many regions, the share of “proper” rice in the bowl was very modest – peasants handed it over as the nengu tax and “filled themselves up” with what remained, enriched with wild plants, turnips, and sweet potatoes. Even today statistics say that around 20% of Japanese people eat rice mixed with other grains – a contemporary echo of those once-compulsory blends.

The paradox is that as urban wealth grew, the fashion for whiteness in the bowl began, quite literally, to kill people in Edo. Polishing the grain – removing the husk and bran – took away not only the colour but also most of the B vitamins, including thiamine (B1), crucial for nerve and muscle metabolism. In cities where the diet of the upper classes was based almost obsessively on white rice, a mysterious disease began to spread: kakke, known in the West as beriberi. Symptoms: weakness, oedema, neuropathies, heart problems – people fell ill even though they “ate their fill.” Only in the late 19th and early 20th century did Japanese doctors such as Takaki Kanehiro link the mass incidence of kakke among sailors and soldiers with a diet based almost exclusively on white rice, and the research of Kazuyuki Eijkman and Christiaan Eijkman on the “bran factor” led to the discovery of thiamine and the realisation that it was precisely the “refining” of the grain that deprived people of health.

In this light, the symbolism of white rice becomes bitterly ironic. For the urban elites of Edo, pure white rice signified “refinement”, “delicacy”, “purity” – in opposition to the “rough”, “peasant” genmai and mixtures with mugi. White rice was easier to eat, much like fast food today. The rural bowl, less visually appealing, with an admixture of barley and millet, was in practice better balanced and far healthier. So when today we hear Western praise for the “traditional Japanese rice-based diet”, it is worth adding an asterisk: yes, rice was central, but what a clerk in Edo ate and what a peasant in the mountains of Shinshū ate were two entirely different universes.

Despite this history, it is the bowl of rice that became the theatrical stage of the Japanese meal. The classic layout ichi-jū san-sai – “one soup, three side dishes” – does not begin with fish or meat. At the centre stands gohan: the bowl of rice. The little bowl of miso soup, the plate of grilled fish, the small portion of pickles – all of these are simply “company” for the grain. In a good ryokan or kaiseki restaurant, rice often appears only at the end of the meal, like a quiet director who closes the whole scene. It is eaten without sauces or ornament, in a separate vessel – so that one can feel the texture, the sweetness, the subtle differences between varieties.

From this same grain, however, an entire universe of forms emerges. Ordinary cooked rice becomes onigiri – triangular or oval balls with a filling (umeboshi plum, salmon, seaweed), wrapped in nori and sold for hundreds of years as quick, bento-style provisions for travellers, labourers, students. When a layer of simmered beef, a pork cutlet in sauce, tempura, or egg lands on rice, we have donburi, the forerunner of Japanese fast food: a single vessel in which carbohydrates, protein, and fat form a satisfying, democratic mix.

In simple home dishes, rice is combined with water, tea, or a light broth – chazuke – to create something like a “culinary reset” after heavy drinking or a late return home. Cooked in a large amount of water, it turns into okayu – a sticky rice porridge served to the sick and to children. And for many Japanese, the quintessence of home comfort remains tamago-kake gohan – a raw egg stirred into hot rice with a dash of soy sauce. It is a dish that, from a sanitary perspective, sends a shiver down European spines, but for a Japanese person it is like “the childhood sandwich”.

Beside ordinary rice stands its twin with a completely different character: mochigome, the glutinous rice used to make mochi, sekihan, dango. From it come New Year’s kagami mochi, everyday grilled snacks, sweets such as daifuku or sakura-mochi. The same raw material, when fermented, becomes nihonshu (sake) – an alcohol which in Shintō is considered “liquid rice” and is at once a festive drink and an offering drink. From the bran, that is, what was left over after polishing, comes nuka-zuke – vegetable pickles in a paste of bran, salt, and spices, full of lactic acid bacteria. From rice flour come senbei – crunchy crackers, dumplings, little dumplings and noodles. Looking at this catalogue, it is easy to see that rice in Japan is not a “starchy side” to a dish, but a material from which textures, aromas, and entire social situations are shaped.

On the one hand – the bowl of white rice as an ideal, a dreamed-of taste of purity, which in the Edo period became for many a remote symbol of prosperity and for some even the cause of illness. On the other – the incredible flexibility of a single grain that can be everyday fuel, festive amulet, sweet, alcohol, pickle, and medicine.

Modern Wall of Rice

In the 20th century, Japan industrialised very rapidly, but if we look at it from the perspective of rice, for a long time it remained simply a modern state… with the mentality of a rice village (and this is not a criticism at all!).

Already during the war, a Food Control Law was introduced which, after 1945, became a tool of almost total state control over rice: it was the government that decided how many hectares could be sown, at what price it would buy grain from farmers, and for how much it would sell it to consumers. The Government Rice Agency was created and an entire administrative system that treated rice as a strategic good: as if it were gas, oil, and electricity all at once. Even in the 1960s and 1970s the state not only set guaranteed prices but actively encouraged a reduction in the cultivated area, because yields were too high and per capita consumption began to fall along with the spread of the Western lifestyle. The farmer was at once the beneficiary and hostage of policy: on the one hand he received a high purchase price, on the other – someone in Tokyo would at some point tell him: “you don’t sow here anymore.”

This system is not purely economic – it is also an architecture of political power. For decades after the war, rural constituencies were overrepresented in parliament: the vote of a provincial resident carried more weight than the vote of a city dweller. Combined with the strong lobbying of agricultural organisations (JA – Japan Agricultural Cooperatives), this gave farmers – and especially rice growers – real power to block reforms, defend high prices, and maintain strict import regulations. Rice agriculture became one of the pillars of the Liberal Democratic Party’s power: politicians from “agricultural” factions won elections for decades by promising that Japanese rice would be protected from the onslaught of cheap grain from the USA or Southeast Asia.

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, this wall began to crumble when globalisation entered the stage with all its baggage – GATT, the Uruguay Round, the WTO, vocabulary such as “market liberalisation” and “non-tariff barrier”. Japan, which was already importing huge amounts of soy, corn, and meat, stubbornly kept rice behind a wall of almost total import ban. For the USA and other rice exporters, this was a symbolic bastion of protectionism. As a result, Japan was forced to accept the concept of minimum access – limited import quotas that were gradually expanded, although the vast majority of that imported rice went into processing, storage, and aid programmes rather than onto the plates of ordinary consumers.

An interesting episode on this axis is the story of the Osaka-based company Sushi Boy, which in the 1990s launched sushi production in California in order to ship frozen sets back to Japan. The idea was, of course, cheaper Californian rice and lower labour costs. The problem was that Japanese law prohibited the import of rice as a product, so a dispute erupted: was frozen sushi a “fish dish” (allowed) or a “rice product” (banned)? After long wrangling, it was decided that the weight predominance of fish allowed it to be classified as a fish product – and thus the first Western sushi from a container in Escondido entered a country that had until recently defended rice like a sacred thing. It is a good illustration of how tradition and global capitalism can collide at a comically concrete point: what percentage of a roll’s mass is rice and what percentage is salmon.

Behind all this, however, lies something more than farmers’ interests and economists’ arguments. The generation that lived through the war, air raids, and post-war hunger experienced rice in an extremely simple mode: if it is there – we survive; if it is not – we die. In the 1940s and 1950s, scenes of children standing in line for a miserable portion of porridge with added rice, or going from house to house with a bowl for “leftovers”, left a lasting mark. Even today, when statistics show that more than half of the calories in the Japanese diet come from imported products – meat, oils, wheat – the idea of self-sufficiency in rice has an emotional dimension. Rice has become a kind of psychological insurance: as long as the fields in the country can produce enough grain to feed the population, the world is “somehow safe”, regardless of how much soy arrives from America and how much frozen salmon from Norway.

Meanwhile, in everyday reality, the bowl of rice… is shrinking. Since the 1960s, rice consumption per capita has been steadily declining. At breakfast, instead of miso and gohan, toast, yoghurt, and cereal appear more and more often; noodles, bread, pizza, and meat dishes push rice out of the role of the unquestioned “centre of the plate”. At the same time, health awareness is growing. Genmai, once associated with poverty, is making a comeback as a premium product: rich in fibre, vitamins, “good for the gut and metabolism”. Multi-grain blends are in fashion – jūhachi-koku, “eighteen-grain rice”, additions of quinoa, black rice, sesame. Mugi gohan, once a “necessity”, becomes a conscious fit choice: a white bowl broken up by brown barley grains, proudly photographed on Instagram.

Rice thus balances between loss of status and quiet persistence. In statistics it loses out to bread, but in konbini – convenience stores that are the new shrines of Japanese everyday life – it still reigns in its most primal form: onigiri. A small triangle of rice and nori, for about 100–150 yen, sells better than most sandwiches. At lunchtime, onigiri shelves empty faster than the bread racks. It is there that continuity is visible: even as the pace of life accelerates, as work and school tear people away from home-cooked meals, “something with rice” remains a natural choice, something one reaches for instinctively.

At the end of this road, what remains is a metaphor. The rice we have followed from the Yayoi period to the WTO is a bit like a cross-section through Japanese civilisation. It is rice that imposed yui – shared work on canals and embankments, where conflict meant flooded fields. It is rice that cemented wa – a quiet care for harmony, because your share of water in your section of tanada depended on good relations with your neighbour. It is rice that caused power for centuries to be power over water and harvest, and later over price and contract. Rice teaches humility before the elements – rain, flood, drought – and at the same time shows how far humans can go in building terraces, embankments, storehouses, exchanges, clearing systems.

In the West, we like to say that “oil is the lifeblood of the economy” or that “without electricity there is no civilisation”. Japan, for long centuries, thought in more organic terms: the circulation of rice – from field, through kurayashiki, through the Rice Exchange in Dōjima, to the bowl – was what truly kept the system alive. Oil and electricity are anonymous, shapeless; rice has a face: an ear, a grain, a bowl, a gesture of joined hands and a quiet itadakimasu.

In the 21st century, this rice civilisation is no longer what it was under the Tokugawa. Japan is no longer a “country of rice” in the economic sense – it is a country of advanced technologies, services, games, anime, cars. But if we listen carefully, rice is still there: in the kanji 米 in the word Beikoku, in the names of meals, in the New Year kagami mochi standing in plastic versions on supermarket shelves, in the custom of leaving not a single grain in the bowl.

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