on rice, the spark of life
A look at the significance of rice, both symbolically and materially, in Japanese tradition.
On Sunday, I messed up the rice.
My English housemate couldn’t understand my devastation. “It’s edible,” she declared, tucking in nevertheless, a weak condolence to the deep ancestral shame I felt in my belly.
It was edible, but it was brittle. I had carefully measured out the portion (２合 go), washed it in cold water, swirling and draining its milky starches in several rounds, and allowed it to drain. As it cooked over a hard flame, I listened to the telltale ‘pachi pachi’ sounds to let me know when to turn the gas off and let it stand to steam.
This was how my father had taught me to cook rice in the absence of a rice cooker, growing up. I have never looked up how to cook rice in a book or online; this is as close to oral tradition as I have experienced.
When I opened the lid, it was meant to be a vision of fluffy moist pearls, each grain glistening, greeting me with buoyancy. Instead, on this occasion, they were sad, and I felt that sadness in my own body.
Rice in Japan is sacred for a reason. It’s used as an offering every morning in Shinto shrines, along with salt and sake (rice wine). There is plenty of symbolism in its whiteness, a favourite in Shinto for its qualities of purity, but more than that — the Chinese character (kanji) for rice 米 is in itself a visual spark of vitality, a pictographic “Hurrah!”, a symbol for the life force energy contained in a single grain of rice.
Ch’i (in Mandarin), or ki (in Japanese) is the nebulous energy that gives vitality to everything within and around us. In the human body, it courses through the meridians and organs, carrying and exhibiting different qualities depending on which function of the body it is feeding. In the heart and endocrine system it is Fire, in the kidneys, Water; in our nervous system, Wood, and so on. When there is a free flow of chi through the body, we are in good health, and exude that vitality around us. When there is a stagnation or a build-up of unhealthy chi, it manifests as disease or deficiency in another part of the body.
The character for ch’i/ki, 氣, is composed of two parts — the radical that translates to mean ‘air’ or ‘breath’, 气, combined with the vital grain of ‘rice’, 米. The character and the notion thereby are a marriage of the ethereal with the material, a flow of an essence that cannot be perceived with the naked eye, yet experienced on some subtle but physical level. This ‘energy’ is not ‘objective’ in the way that we might think of energy in Western physics, for it is encoded with an informational seed, like a grain of rice. In Chinese medicine, ch’i is understood to contain a power that comes with an intention: life would not occur without an underlying will to grow and thrive.
It’s quite symbolic of the Chinese communist agenda that one of the many ‘simplifications’ of the Mandarin language removed the 米 from the character for ch’i — in mainland China now written as 气 — the ‘life force’ of energy dissolved into amnesia on a linguistic level. It hasn’t taken long for omission of the spirit of ch’i to permeate mainland Chinese culture, built on thoroughly practical, pragmatic values.
This is not the case in Taiwan, where the traditional script of Mandarin is still used, and where the culture and people are steeped more deeply in the flow of ch’i than anywhere else I know on earth.
In the Japanese language, the character ki 気 uses the cursive version of the character for 米, so the essence of its meaning has been retained. 「気の流れ」 “the flow of ki” can refer to the flow within the human body, in terms of the meridian system.
There is always a flow of ki between two or more people, forming a more complex ambience, a relational dynamic. It can refer to a space, like a garden or a forest, or a room — where furniture is positioned intentionally to allow a flow, not ‘too’ far apart and not ‘too’ close together.
This understanding of ki forms a backdrop to Japanese framing of the world in both micro and macrocosms. I think of the symbol of the grain of rice in relation both to the governing principles of the universe, as well as to the literal principles of agriculture.
When I lived on farms in Nagano and Yamanashi, we planted the grains of rice in spring. Within a week, they had sprouted bright green tendril-like tufts. By May they had grown to a few inches, and we spent the days wading through muddy paddies planting the seedlings.
I loved the silk of the mud between my toes, but was incredulous that such delicate plants could take root in such softness — but within a week, they really had, and grew robust. I felt inspired by the trust the farmers had in their crop.
We spent the summer and early autumn weaving between their smiling green forms, scattering rice husks to prevent weeds from growing, and using taguruma, these wheeled contraptions of old that carefully removed weeds between the rows. Each plant was a miracle of life itself, having burst from a single grain and promising to give birth to hundreds more.
In the autumn we built bamboo structures to hang the harvested crop to dry in the sun, binding two bunches at the base to drape over the poles. It was all hot, hard work. But there was an intimacy borne between the land, the rice, and us. We farmed and nurtured the crop, which in turn nurtured us. The ‘pachi pachi’ sound of the rice as it cooked over the fire felt almost sacred. I felt connected to an experience shared by my ancestors, something both primal and divine.
Because when rice first arrived in Japan, it represented a sort of miracle.
I never considered its significance in this way until I was staying with a friend called Samon in rural Akita, the northeast of Japan from whence my ancestors hail. He lived with his young family in a hamlet sandwiched between small but steep mountains, a smattering of a dozen farmhouses amid a basin of fields.
The sun would rise from behind the mountains at a different angle depending on the time of year, which would determine their work for the day. Samon was from Akita City and had met his wife travelling. They had moved to this hamlet in their early 30s, a courageous decision given they were the first people to ‘move in’ to the hamlet in anecdotal memory.
One night, Samon asked me to imagine — to really imagine, with the depth of my being, the miracle that rice represented.
It was summer in Akita, and we were cooking outside on a fire, drinking sake with friends in the moonlight, lighting senko hanabi (‘incense fireworks’) with the children and splitting watermelon from the fields, red juices running sticky down our chins and fingers. Surrounded by dark mountains among these fields inhabited for centuries, folk with whom I must at some point in my lineage share blood, it was easy to embody that resonance of antiquity he encouraged me to imagine.
Japan was a hunter gatherer culture in the prehistoric Jōmon era, relying on foods foraged from the forests — acorns, greens, etc. — as well as deer, wild boar, and shellfish. Rice was a relatively modern introduction via Korea and China, probably arriving in Kyushu around 1000BC and gradually spreading across the archipelago over the following centuries.
Rice was a crop that all they had to do was plant, nurture and harvest, in order to guarantee a food source throughout the whole year. To the indigenous folk of Japan so reliant on the uncertainty of hunting and foraging for their survival, it must have been a sort of existential relief we can’t fathom in our modern world.
Farming rice by hand is no joke — the task was traditionally entrusted to women, because it involves a lot of ‘low-down’ work. It’s low enough, though, that no matter how short you are, you still have to bend over double to reach the weeds. It isn’t uncommon to see women in their 80s or 90s in Japan with deformed spines for this reason.
I had weeded some fields in this traditional fashion, and had found it difficult to stand up straight for a few hours afterwards. I imagined that pain manifold over, and the idea that their sustenance and their family’s was dependent on such work, and couldn’t fathom anything much more brutal.
And yet that was the easier and more reliable alternative to the precarious existence of hunter-gatherer life. No wonder that rice became an object of worship, worthy of guardianship from the inari gods, to whom a third of all Shinto shrines are dedicated. No wonder that rice became the symbol of life. It became the flow of currency in the Edo era, a means of taxation and synonymous with wealth. And it is prepared as an offering every day to the gods in shrines across the land, in praise and in sacrifice to ensure a successful harvest.
Farming rice also came, of course, with a need to be aware of and in sync with the cycles of nature. The paddies needed to be filled, and waterways needed to be channeled in collective effort and compromise. Our ancestors needed to know the land, to know the sun, to know how to read the clouds and predict the rains and winds. They kept guard over their crop as they would a child. They understood the interrelation of the land with the heavens, and where they stood in amongst that.
There was a deep stirring in me as I felt this mixture of relief, praise, gratitude, and oddly, guilt — for at the age of 24, this was the first time I had taken a moment to actually imagine the hardship my ancestors had experienced to simply survive. I felt into the strength, courage and determination it must have taken them to do whatever they could do improve the lives of their imagined conceptions, children and grandchildren and their children into infinity.
This is true of all of us — we all come from lineages as long as the existence of earth itself. We all descend from a long line of peoples who did what they had to in order to give Life to their children.
A lot of people have asked me what I mean by ancestral healing. To me, it is a sense of belonging to something ‘greater’, a notion of collectivity and interconnection in our humanity.
I am fully aware that this connection with rice is not unique to Japan, and that every land and people has its own intimacy with certain foods. I feel honoured to have experienced such fullness of that process, from seed to crop to meal.
We are all interwoven, after all, and my story of ancestral healing will carry an echo of all others.
