Is "Japan = Rice" a Myth? Millet, Miso and Who the Japanese Are

Wet-rice cultivation was never universal across the Japanese archipelago, and polished white rice was long a luxury largely confined to the ruling classes. The phenomenon of more than one hundred million people eating rice every single day is a creature of very recent history.

Historically, the majority of Japanese did not live on rice; their sustenance was drawn from millets, taro, and other upland crops.

Reclaiming a diverse culinary culture grounded in millets and root crops is not merely a pragmatic necessity; it could also open new possibilities for Japanese culture itself.

Between 1590 and 1877, spanning the Edo period and the early Meiji years, some 3,710 peasant uprisings (hyakusho ikki) were recorded, most of them protests against famine and spiking rice prices.

The modern system constructed since the Meiji era around the equation of rice and nation is breaking down before our eyes.

What we ought to do is return to the lesson of the late Edo period: when catastrophic famines struck, the crop that saved people from mass starvation was the sweet potato.

Miso came to be made in every region, but as a fermented food it varies greatly with the "fudo" (風土) of the region where it is made and with the "maker." The "microbes" the land and the person carry are the key in fermenting miso.

One must consider that unless one chooses miso that suits one's own body, one cannot expect a great health effect and may even grow worse.

What those who came before us built up was not an emotional aesthetic. In the environment of Japan it was "bioengineering to adjust for genetic and geographic conditions."

Rumors of this miracle crop eventually moved the shogunate itself.

Looking back at how the sweet potato became an instrument of survival against famine, I cannot help feeling that modern people, forced to live in an increasingly degraded biosphere, are already entering an era of survival that rivals—if not surpasses—those historical crises.

The rice-centered theory begins from the claim that rice cultivation — specifically wet-rice farming — shaped a single Japanese culture, and it interprets history as a whole through the equation of "the Japanese = wet-rice agriculture." The figure who laid the foundation for this school of thought was the folklorist Kunio Yanagita (1875–1962).

Having no ties to academia myself, I have spent years examining history, culture, customs, and faith as an integrated whole.

The lives of the people in the blank spaces excluded from this inquiry continued to be ignored; those who neither grew rice nor enshrined it were treated as though they were not Japanese at all. The greatest piece of propaganda born of this view is the insistent claim that "rice is the staple food of the Japanese."

In contemporary Japan, eating mochi (pounded rice cakes) at New Year's is generally taken for granted as traditional culture, yet this view too stems from Yanagita's rice-centered theory; in reality, there were once many regions across Japan where mochi was not eaten at New Year's at all. Tsuboi proved that in these regions, people instead offered and ate taro at New Year's.

Tsuboi placed particular emphasis on slash-and-burn farming, a practice that has now dwindled to almost nothing and is for all practical purposes extinct.

There was a plural reality—dry-field farming (teihata, 定畑) of crops other than rice, slash-and-burn farming (yakihata, 焼畑), fishing, and more—and while it is true that some regions depended on rice, that could never have been equated with Japan or the Japanese as a whole.

At the same time, I feel that now is an opportunity to break free from the fixed idea that "Japan = rice."

Indeed, toward the end of last summer, when the rice shortage had become a social issue, I was traveling across northern Tohoku for my fieldwork, and I saw rice ripening across wet paddies that stretched to the far edge of vast plains; on my research trip to Wakasa last weekend, I saw the same sight.

In short, the rice is there. The fuller truth, it seems to me, is simply that it is not being released onto the market.

The cause was the massive eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in June 1991.

Above all, Thai rice did not suit Japanese tastes at all, nor was it suited to being cooked in Japanese rice cookers.