Conference in English.
In 1993, when then US President Bill Clinton tried to open up the Japanese rice market, there was an unprecedented outcry. He was seen as the Commodore Perry whose black ship forced the opening of Japan in 1853 and 1854. That farmers were opposed to the negotiations came as no surprise, but the Japanese population participated widely in the opposition movement, being prepared to pay several times the price to keep their rice in Japan. All political parties, right and left, promised to fight "to the death" against American pressure to open up the rice market. Opposition was not just to long-grain rice, but to Californian rice, grown from Japanese seed. Thus, until the prosperity of the 1980s, there was no such thing as "Japanese rice", as each farmer saved his seeds for the following year. The rhetoric was written in the language of "rice as self-identity" and "rice paddies are our land", beautifying our land and purifying our water and air, which California rice does not.
The strength of the symbolic value of rice expressed during this movement was quite remarkable at a time when Japan had long "suffered" from rice overproduction and the government subsidized farmers to leave rice fields fallow, despite the exceptionally cold summer of 1993 which produced very low rice yields.
To understand this "imbalance" between the symbolic value attributed to rice as self-identity and the political economy linked to rice cultivation, I examine here historical and ethnographic data over a long period of Japanese history from a comparative perspective.
Rice growing was probably introduced to Japan from China around 300 BC. It became the cornerstone of the political economy of political powers, including the imperial court. State control of rice production, distribution and consumption began at least in the 6th century and has continued literally throughout history, including its campaign against the meat diet. Emperor Tenmu (c. 672-686) commissioned scholars to compile the mythical stories of Kojiki and Nihonshoki, including the myth in which the deity of food cultivated the first rice crop. The Sun Goddess sent the celestial grandson to transform the wild world - the Japanese archipelago - into a land teeming with succulent rice plants. In 675, Emperor Tenmu issued an edict to perform two national rituals to promote rice cultivation. Seven days later, the emperor issued another important decree, banning the eating of five agriculturally useful animals. The official reason for this ban was respect for the Buddhist doctrine of mercy for all living beings, which stressed the importance of avoiding the defilement associated with corpses, both human and animal, which was an important belief in the indigenous religion of Shintoism.
Impurity had become a form of radical negativity by the 12th century, and was associated with meat and those who killed animals. Throughout the 17th and into the 19th centuries, nativist intellectuals valorized agricultural work as a practice of the "way of the ancients", thus providing the ideological/symbolic weapon to focus exclusively on agriculture, while the wheel of modernization was rapidly turning towards industrialization and the arrival of other economic activities. The "official" Japanese diet has since consisted of fish and vegetables. When Commodore Perry forced the opening of Japan in 1853 and 1854, the Japanese entered into a fierce debate: should they adopt a meat diet in order to catch up and compete with the West? Those opposed to imitating the West emphasized the importance of rice cultivation and the superiority of a rice-based diet, even though the army, which adhered to the rice-based diet, suffered enormous losses from beriberi, far more than on the battlefield, whereas there were no casualties among the sailors, whose diet included barley and bread. In fact, vitamin B1 deficiency as the cause of beriberi was only discovered in 1910.
