Japan Losing Its Food Culture

[Mulboyne]

[Watcher]

That's what happens when the pressures of society tear apart the traditional family. When both parents are forced to work to keep up with the perceived necessities of life children suffer. They are raised by TVs and videogames, extra-study courses and extramural activities. Parents have been pushing their responsibilities onto teachers while at the same time limiting the amount of discipline a teacher can dole out. This isn't just in Japan. It's a worlwide plight.
My family is more traditional with myself working and being the breadwinner and a wife who stays home to raise the children. We have awesome meals together (seriously, many would be jealous) and lots of face to face time. There is a cost to that, however. The Canadian gov't pegged a homemaker's worth somewhere around $100k. The US gov't. the same. Sure, if we were both working we might have a bigger house, two new luxury cars, and more junk than we could handle... but we will not sacrifice our family for that.

[Kuang_Grade]

http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB118092471979823451.html

Making Perfect Rice
The Japanese Way
Can Cost Big Bucks

By YUKARI IWATANI KANE
June 4, 2007; Page A1
More than four years ago, Japan's Toshiba Corp. began working on a top-secret electronic device. The $830 machine -- which some say resembles a tiny spaceship -- had a powerful vacuum pump to suck all the air out. It was designed to withstand 264 pounds of pressure, and it made use of silver and powdered diamonds. Production of the contraption, which takes about 30 people to assemble, started last year.

Toshiba's creation is the "Vacuum Pressure Cooker," the company's most expensive rice cooker ever. The pressure makes it possible to boil the water in the cooker at a higher temperature, thus making for fatter, shinier and sweeter grains of rice. The air-sucking filter creates a vacuum causing the rice to absorb water more quickly while it soaks. The silver and diamond dust are used to coat the cooking vessel so as to distribute heat evenly, so every grain of rice has the same texture.

"It was a lot of work," says Noriko Saito, one of Toshiba's chief rice-cooker developers. She test-cooked as much as 330 pounds of rice a week to determine the best cooking process, using both the vacuum and pressure technologies.

Such an all-out effort might seem bizarre for something as mundane as cooking rice, which is easy to do in a pot on the stove or in a $10 electric rice cooker of the sort used throughout the world.

But many Japanese, who are fiercely proud to be obsessed with rice, wouldn't dream of anything so simple. After all, they're connoisseurs. While Japan imports a small percentage of rice from countries such as the U.S. and China, most of it is processed into foods like rice crackers and soybean paste for soup. The vast majority of the rice that is eaten is grown in Japan, which has about 300 different varieties of rice, some with romantic names like "Dream of Stars" and "Love at First Sight." Rice aficionados subscribe to rice-of-the-month clubs and are willing to pay about $5.50 a pound for premium rice. Japanese consumers spend an average of $150 for their rice cookers, the highest price in the world.

To many Japanese, who consume nearly five times as much rice as Americans do and who consider it the most important part of a meal, it makes sense to go to great lengths to bring out the flavor of rice. Good rice cooked properly, is sweet, shiny and fragrant, experts say, and has just the right amount of stickiness to clump together between chopsticks.

"The ideal rice can be enjoyed first with the eyes, then with the nose and finally with the tongue as the sweetness spreads upon chewing," says Toyozou Nishijima, a certified rice expert in Japan.

Now, as Japan's economy improves and a boom in health-consciousness draws more favorable attention to traditional rice-centered meals, more Japanese consumers are willing to pay as much as $1,000 for ultra high-end rice cookers. In a $100 million a year market that has remained mostly flat for years, high-end rice cookers helped increase total rice-cooker sales by 12% last year, according to the Japan Electrical Manufacturers' Association. Manufacturers make these rice cookers only for the Japanese market because they say very few people outside of Japan appreciate the taste of plain, white rice enough to pay such high prices.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Japan's largest rice-cooker maker in revenue, touts a $600 rice cooker that promises to give rice exactly 2.4 times as much oligosaccharide -- a kind of sugar -- as its previous models. It uses a two-step soaking process and a steam function. Hitachi Ltd.'s $600 model has a Teflon-coated stainless bowl with gold flecks on the inside to seal in the heat and make extra-sweet rice. Zojirushi Corp. put artificial-intelligence technology into its rice cooker, to adjust the cooking process automatically according to seasonal differences in air and water temperature.

Toshiba's high-end rice cooker, which is available in two sizes, has sold more than 70,000 since its launch in September, making it the best-seller in the super-expensive category, according to an estimate by GfK Marketing Services Ltd., which tracks such data.

One recent convert is Yuki Ando, a 33-year-old housewife in western Japan. Ms. Ando bought Toshiba's vacuum-pressure device in December, after her husband complained that her old rice cooker -- which itself had cost $320 -- made the rice taste dry. Even a discounted price of $490 gave Ms. Ando pause, but she took the plunge because she knew she would be using the cooker every day. One favorite feature: the ability to keep rice warm in the pot for 32 hours in a vacuum that preserves flavor.

"I'm not exaggerating. The rice was shiny, standing upright and fluffy," says Ms. Ando. "My husband, who is particularly picky about rice, has never complained."

The latest rash of technology is a bit much for Mr. Nishijima, the rice expert. "Just because you pay 70,000 yen [about $575] or 110,000 yen doesn't mean that there's a drastic change in taste," says Mr. Nishijima, who adds that good rice can be made with the simplest of rice cookers if it is to be eaten right away. He thinks consumers might be too susceptible to hype. "It almost seems like anything is OK as long as it's expensive," he says.

Still, the race for incremental improvements in rice cooking is a serious business for companies like Toshiba. The company struggled with making the combination of pressure and vacuum technologies work because the two opposing forces put such a strain on the rice cooker that the lid would warp or crack. It wasn't until six months before launch that the company came up with a solution -- a heavy steel frame for the lid.

For the past 13 years, Ms. Saito, the rice-cooker developer, has been devoted to rice cookers and testing batches of rice. The 37-year-old sniffs each batch she makes for sweetness, checks its appearance for shine and fluffiness, and then cuts into it with a scoop to make sure the texture is the same all the way down to the bottom of the bowl. "If the rice is cooked badly," Ms. Saito says, "you might feel resistance or mushiness when you insert the rice scoop, but if it's cooked well, it goes in very smoothly."

The latest rice cookers have come a long way since Toshiba in 1955 sold the world's first automatic electric rice cooker and freed Japanese housewives from having to cook their rice in heavy pots on wood-fire stoves. The first machine simply had a heating element beneath the bowl in which the rice cooked. Since then, rice-cooker manufacturers have improved the cooking process, employing everything from a computer chip, induction heating coils around the bowl to make the rice cook evenly, and most recently pressure technology to make the rice more moist and fluffy.

While Toshiba's rice cooker has been the best-selling in the high-end category, it was actually one persistent developer at Mitsubishi Electric Corp. who triggered the race for upscale rice cookers with a $1,000 model with an inner cooking bowl made of graphite, which heats up quickly and evenly -- ideal qualities for making rice uniformly fluffy. But it was also fragile and porous. It took Mitsubishi two years to develop a bowl that was sturdy enough, and the bowl is still so difficult to make that the company can only make 50 of them a day.

Mitsubishi has sold more than 20,000 of the rice cookers since they went on sale in March 2006, twice as many as it had expected.

Toshiba's Ms. Saito says Mitsubishi's initial success was encouraging for the entire industry. "We only put so much money into research and development if rice cookers can't sell for more than 30,000 yen," or about $245, says Ms. Saito, who believes there's still room for improvements. "But if we know that consumers will pay 100,000 yen [$820], it changes the picture.