Most Americans, for example, view rice as just another commodity available on supermarket shelves. But in Japan, o-kome, or "honorable rice," is much more than a commodity. In the Shinto religion ...

“We really need more sustainable rice farming methods,” says Yamazaki. Spurred to help develop solutions, Ichihashi and his team joined the KOME-DOKORO COI-NEXT project in 2022. Led by ...

This effort forms part of the KOME-DOKORO or ‘rice producing region’ COI-NEXT project, which aims to create a ‘circular’ bioeconomy in Niigata’s KOME-DOKORO region, led by Wataru ...

But neither could have been the main cause of the scarcity, so I turned to a book by Masayuki Ogawa titled “Nihon no Kome Mondai” (literally, “Japan’s rice problems”). There, I thought I ...