I
How many people who have not been in the East or in the rice trade realise that rice, in the course of the polishing it receives from the farmer and the dealer, loses nearly half its bulk? A necessary part of the grain is lost. No wonder that sensible people in Japan and the West demand the grey unpolished rice. In Japan some enterprising person has started selling bottled stuff made from the part of the rice grain that is rubbed off in the polishing process. It does not look appetising. An easier thing would be to leave some of the coating on the rice. One thinks of what Smollett said of white bread:
"They prefer it to wholesome bread because it is whiter. Thus they sacrifice their health to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging eye, and the tradesman is obliged to poison them in order to live."
Although, for economy's sake, a considerable amount of barley is eaten with or instead of rice, it may be said in a general way that the Japanese people, like so many millions of other Asiatics, have rice for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If they have anything to eat between meals it is as like as not to be rice cakes—- to the foreigner's taste a loathly, half-cooked compost of rice flour or pounded rice and water, a sort of tepid underdone muffin. We in the West have bread at every meal as the Japanese have rice, but we eat our bread not only as plain bread but as toast and bread-and-butter; we also ring the changes on brown, white and oat bread.
Among the covered lacquer dishes on the little table set before each kneeling breakfaster, luncher or diner in Japan there is one which is empty. This is the rice bowl. When the meal begins—or in the case of an elaborate dinner at the rice course—the maid brings in a large covered wooden copper-bound or brass-bound tub or round lacquered box of hot rice. This rice she serves with a big wooden spoon, the only spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal. A man may have three helpings or four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup. The etiquette is that, though other dishes may be pecked at, the rice in one's bowl must be finished. The usage on this point may have originated in the feeling that it was almost impious to waste the staple food of the country. It is not difficult to pick up the last rice grains with the wooden hashi (chopsticks), for the rice is skilfully boiled. (Soft rice is served to invalids only.) But when the bowl is almost empty the custom is to pour into it weak tea or hot water, and then to drink this, so getting rid of the odd grains. It is through omitting to drink in this way that foreigners get indigestion when at a Japanese meal they eat a lot of rice.
At first it is not easy for the foreigner to believe that people can come with appetite to several bowls of plain rice three times a day.[[80] ] But good rice does seem to have something of the property of oatmeal, the property of a continual tastiness. Further, the rice eater picks up now and then from a small saucer a piece of pickle which may have either a salty or a sweet fermented taste. The nutrition gained at a Japanese meal is largely in soups in which the bean preparations, tofu and miso, and occasionally eggs, are used. And there is no country in the world where more fish is eaten than in Japan. The coast waters and rivers team with fish, and fish—fresh, dried and salted, shell-fish and fish unrecognisable as fish after all sorts of ingenious treatment—is consumed by almost everybody.
The Japanese are in no doubt that the foreign rice which is brought into the country to supplement the home supply is inferior to their own.[[81] ] Inferior means that they prefer the flavour of their own rice, just as most Scots prefer oatmeal made from oats grown in Scotland.