Imperial Self-Sufficiency In Japan

Before the introduction of modern technology, rice cultivation required considerable communal work and in spite of advances in technology it still requires intense labor (Sakaiya, 1993, 77). As rice cultivation is very labor intensive, it changed the way people lived when rice introduced to Japan. Therefore, communities or villages began to form and it consisting of farming families. These villages became tightly organized groups which turned out to be the basis of the Japanese societal structure that still survives on into modern times (Varley, 2000, 5). So the formation of the Japanese society had begun and there is no doubt that the Yayoi period [ca.400 BC – 250 AD] laid the foundation for what later became the Japan of today (Ohnuki-Tierney,
(Francks, 2003). In Francks article Rice for the Masses: Food Policy and the Adoption of Imperial Self-Sufficiency in Early Twentieth-Century Japan, he suggests that Rice Riots not only shifted in the pattern of food demand because consumers became better off and they adopted ‘urban’ life-styles, but also ensured the availability of Japanese-style rice as a luxury product and the staple food for the ordinary people before 1890s. Rice becoming the staple of the Japanese society and considered as a common food product of people’s daily
More and more similar food that replaced the status of rice as a staple food in Japan. In another Francks’ article— Consuming Rice: Food, ‘Traditional’ Products, and the History of Consumption in Japan. He argues that shifting patterns of rice consumption were determined, as were those of comparable food products elsewhere, as part of the process of social and economic change that preceded and accompanied industrialization and ‘modernization’. (Francks, 2007). People have many options when they face the various kinds of food that from other countries. Rice became the food that along with other