Rice as Self: Japanese Identities
through Time (Princeton Paperbacks)
by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
Grains Of Truth, Some Of It Unpalatable
Are we what we eat? What does food reveal about how we live and how
we think of ourselves in relation to others? Why do people have a strong
attachment to their own cuisine and an aversion to the foodways of others?
In this engaging account of the crucial significance rice has for the
Japanese, Rice as Self examines how people use the metaphor of a
principal food in conceptualizing themselves in relation to other peoples.
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney traces the changing contours that the Japanese
notion of the self has taken as different historical Others--whether Chinese
or Westerner--have emerged, and shows how rice and rice paddies have
served as the vehicle for this deliberation. Using Japan as an example, she
proposes a new cross-cultural model for the interpretation of the self and
other.

Personal Review: Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through
Time (Princeton Paperbacks) by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
Not one American in 10,000 has any connection with growing or selling
rice, so the pressure of the American government to open up Japan to our
rice stands as the most bizarre of all the weird legacies of Reaganomics.
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, professor of anthropology at the University of
Wisconsin, believes the rice trade had assumed (at the time this book was
published, in 1993) a symbolic importance to American policymakers.
Perhaps so, although they speak as if the question is substantial.
However, 'Rice as Self' is not about America's dangerous delusions about
rice. It is about Japanese attitudes toward the grain, and it turns out they
are in some ways deluded as well, though harmlessly so.
'A people's cuisine, or a particular food, often marks the boundary between
the collective self and the other, for example, as a basis of discrimination
against other people,' writes Ohnuki-Tierney, who was born in Japan and
has investigated 'others' there, such as the Ainu.
In America, we are often told that rice is so basic to Japanese ways that
the words for breakfast and dinner translate literally as 'morning rice' and
'evening rice.' But Ohnuki-Tierney says this centrality is more psychic than
physical. There is an intellectual dispute in Japan about whether rice was
ever the staple food there. The common people may have been more
dependent on millet or, later, sweet potatoes.
But there is no denying the importance of rice to Japanese ways of
thinking. Rice is not 'self' the way Hawaiians regard themselves as
interchangable with kalo (taro, the elder brother of the first Hawaiian), but it
was a gift from the gods. It has a soul, is the 'purest' form of payment and
may also be equivalent to semen.
Even if you are what you eat, this is a heavy load of symbolism for a food
to carry. And it retains its symbolic force, says Ohnuki-Tierney, though
'scarcely any contemporary Japanese would hold . . . that rice has a soul
or that rice is a deity.'
Paradoxically, 'the symbolism of rice has remained more important for the
Japanese people than rice agriculture itself.' As affluence has increased,
the Japanese have eaten less and less rice, preferring to fill up on what
used to be side dishes of vegetables, fish and flesh. (In Hawaii, the 'two-
scoop rice' of the old-time okazu-ya [cafeteria] lunch has in recent years
been reduced, usually, to just one scoop.)
At the same time, they have become even fussier about their rice,
specializing in the grain grown in the northeastern prefectures. Production,
however, is very low. Ohnuki-Tierney says 10 million kilos a year, a
misprint for 10 million tons. Still, that is only half a pound a day per person,
not an enormous amount. (In another place, she gives consumption as 72
kilograms per person per year, which matches the correct production
figure.)
The paradoxes keep piling up. Though Japan fiercely protects its rice
agriculture, it produces less of its food than any other nation -- 49 percernt
in 1988. The United States supplies most of the deficit. (A situation
changing in favor of Southeast Asia since this book was completed.)

Here on Maui, rice is free -- the price of 20 cents a pound is less than it
costs to ship it in. In Japan, people pay about eight times what Americans
Mainlanders pay for rice.They tell interviewers that they can easily afford
expensive rice, since they eat so little of it.
'Rice as Self' demonstrates that almost everything about the link between
rice and Japanese people contains paradox, although their conception of
paddies as the most beautiful and significant landscape -- 'our land' -- may
be somewhat less in conflict with reality than the other functions of rice.
In any case, modernity is slowly changing the relationship of Japanese to
rice, Ohnuki-Tierney indicates. Her book certainly challenges many glib
assumptions about 'Japanese character' that have been pushed in the
USA. And for AJAs (Americans of Japanese ancestry), 'Rice as Self' has
additional piquance.
Ohnuki-Tierney's persuasive book deserves a much wider readership than
anthropological monographs usually get.
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