Rice: representations and reality.(Report)

EVEN if most Japanese today may no longer eat rice at every meal, rice is still not only their staple food (shushoku [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), it is also the food par excellence. Unless they have eaten a bowl of rice, Japanese may not feel they have eaten to satisfaction even after having savored all the delicacies a Japanese meal can offer. Yet not every variety of rice suits the Japanese palate. Only the Japonica variety, it seems, is really considered tasty.

During the acute rice shortage following the crop failure of 1993 the Government imported rice from overseas, but consumers' reactions made it clear to everybody that even in such an emergency people were not prepared to do without their favorite brand as long as they could get hold of even a limited amount. News that mice were found in a shipment created a considerable uproar; also, people were convinced that eating foreign rice was hazardous to their health because, so the rumor went, foreign farmers made heavy, indiscriminate use of insecticides, and shipments were treated with strong chemicals to prevent deterioration of the merchandise. To a non-Japanese observer, such hysterical reactions may be difficult to appreciate; but if anything they demonstrate that, for many Japanese, rice is not any rice, and rice is not mere food. Many who argued that importing rice was an attack on the very foundations of Japanese culture as a "culture of rice" (inasaku bunka [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) were supported by the mass media, agricultural organizations, and scholars. (1)

Since rice is an important crop in the ritual life of Shinto, it is quite natural that it comes up in discussions about that religion. It can also be expected that rice cultivation would be discussed when the relation or contribution of Shinto to ecology is considered. (2) For many years Tomiyama Kazuko has been campaigning for a reconsideration of how much traditional rice cultivation has shaped and contributed to the Japanese landscape (see, for example, TOMIYAMA 1993). In her paper she again emphasized the beauty of paddy fields. The conclusion would be that their maintenance per se is a vital contribution to ecology. If we further accept Kohori Kunio's statement that "Shinto is essentially in accord with Japanese life, work, and culture" (KOHORI 1997, 4), we may be inclined to assume that Shinto in fact provides a strong stimulus for rice farmers to care for the environment.

However, does rice and its cultivation really stand for all of Japanese culture? And is its production just by itself a contribution to a healthy ecology today? As Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney mentioned in her paper at the conference, arguments for other constitutive aspects of Japanese culture have appeared in recent years. These arguments do not deny the importance of rice for an understanding of Japanese culture, but they make it increasingly apparent that the singular emphasis given to rice presents only a partial, and for that reason a biased, picture of Japanese culture. In the course of my fieldwork in a rice-producing mountain village of northern Japan, a number of questions occurred to me concerning the role of rice and the significance of the concept of "culture of rice" in the life of the villagers and in Japanese culture in general. In fact, I believe that the singular insistence on the importance of rice diverts our attention not only from certain social factors but also from ecological ones.

In what follows I intend to make three points. First, I will outline some of the historical background to symbolic representations of rice, both religious and secular, and their significance in relation to political power and social difference. Second, I briefly consider the situation in a particular village in order to delineate some problems that the connection of rice with political power creates today for the environment and farmers. And third, I will indicate the possible significance of the fact that farmers today see rice mainly as a commodity.

REPRESENTATIONS: THE SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE OF RICE

Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney said in her paper that, for the Japanese, on a cosmological level nature is synonymous with the "country [i.e., Japan] of succulent ears of rice plants" (mizuho no kuni [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), and furthermore that rice is the symbol of self and nation, as well as of purity and the force of life.