Japanese Rice Dishes: Onigiri, Sushi, Sake, and the Food Culture Rice Built

Part 1 of this series traced how rice built Japan’s history: not simply a food, but for long stretches a form of currency, a store of wealth, a symbol of power, and — for well over a thousand years, until the Meiji era’s land tax reform brought it to an end — the country’s basic unit of tax.

This second article returns to the present, and to what rice built at the table. It covers the rice grown in Japan today, and the dishes, snacks, and drinks that grew out of it — with a few worth seeking out on a visit to Japan.

The Rice Grown in Japan

The rice mainly cultivated in Japan is 短粒種 Japonica rice. Set against the world’s other major rice family, Indica, its character is distinct.

Cooked, Japonica rice turns soft and slightly sticky, with a chewy texture that grows sweeter the more it is chewed. The grains themselves are shorter and rounder than Indica’s. It stays good even cold, grows well in relatively cool climates, and for all of those reasons has become the rice of washoku.

Among Japonica varieties, a few names come up again and again:

– Koshihikari — the best-known Japonica variety, grown across the country

– Akitakomachi — bred from Koshihikari, and noted for an even stickier texture

– Sasanishiki — comparatively light and less sticky, and a common choice for sushi

These, and the many other everyday varieties like them, are collectively known as 粳米 uruchimai, to distinguish them from the glutinous rice discussed below.

Other kinds of rice worth knowing

– 古代米 kodaimai, ancient rice — varieties close to rice’s original strains, including 黒米 kuromai, black rice, and 赤米 akamai, red rice. Both are rich in minerals and typically eaten mixed with white rice.

– もち米 mochigome, glutinous rice — a notably sticky variety once treated as a sacred food. Today it is used for sekihan, okowa, and traditional sweets.

Rice Dishes Worth Trying in Japan

Japonica rice’s particular qualities are why it sits at the center of washoku. A bowl of hot rice alongside a main dish and a bowl of miso soup — the standard teishoku, or set meal — is the everyday form this takes.

But if there is one dish worth seeking out for the rice itself, it is one built directly around cooked rice — gohan — as the main event. The following are the dishes that do exactly that.

Onigiri (Omusubi)

Rice wrapped around a filling — 梅 ume, pickled plum, or おかか okaka, bonito flakes mixed with soy sauce, among others — and wrapped again in nori. Eaten with one hand, it is the standard of Japanese picnics, cherry-blossom viewings, and bento boxes.

Onigiri’s history runs deep. It appears to have served as portable food as far back as the Yayoi period, roughly 2,000 years ago: a lump of carbonized rice unearthed at the Sugitani Chanobatake archaeological site in Ishikawa Prefecture is considered its prototype. By the Heian period, a version called 屯食 tonjiki was distributed at the imperial court. Through the Kamakura and Sengoku periods, onigiri served samurai as 兵糧 hyōrō, military provisions, typically filled with pickled plum. With the spread of nori in the Edo period, onigiri reached ordinary households and settled into something close to its present-day form.

A dish with wide variation. A newer method, 握らず onigirazu, places rice at the center of a sheet of nori and folds the nori around it rather than pressing the rice by hand — the name literally means “not squeezed” (お + 握らない). Eaten more like a sandwich, it caught on for letting people cook and eat without getting their hands sticky.

Naming splits along regional lines: onigiri in western Japan, omusubi in the east. Shape varies just as freely — triangular, round, or the cylindrical tawara shape — by region and household alike.

Sushi

Everyone’s favorite Japanese food needs little introduction: seafood laid over vinegared rice, called シャリ shari. Variations abound, from scattered chirashizushi to pressed oshizushi.

Sushi carries a certain prestige today, but in the late Edo period it was street-stall fast food — closer in spirit to a hamburger stand, a kebab cart, or dim sum than to the formal counter experience many visitors now expect.

Takikomi Gohan

Rice cooked together with ingredients and seasoning in a single pot. The crust that forms at the bottom, おこげ okoge, is a small reward in itself. Common additions include carrot, fried tofu, and chicken.

Two related dishes are worth distinguishing from it.

Sekihan. Glutinous rice cooked with 大角豆 sasage, a type of cowpea, and topped with sesame salt. The rice takes on a faint red tint and is traditionally served on occasions worth celebrating, such as a child’s school entrance. Azuki beans have largely replaced sasage in recent years — though, as this author’s grandmother maintains, sekihan made with sasage has a fuller flavor, and she still buys them specially on the rare occasions she makes it.

Okowa. Glutinous rice steamed with ingredients such as wild mountain vegetables, pork, or mushrooms. It resembles takikomi gohan but differs in both the rice used and the cooking method:

Takikomi gohan — Okowa

|—|—|—|

Rice used — Uruchimai — Mochigome

Method — Cooked with ingredients — Steamed with ingredients

Tamago Kake Gohan

White rice topped with a raw egg and soy sauce. Using a raw egg may sound alarming to some readers, but there is little cause for concern: eggs produced in Japan are subject to strict hygiene standards. That said, always use an egg within its expiration date, and this dish is best avoided by infants, the elderly, pregnant women, and anyone with a weakened immune system.

There is more than one accepted method:

– Mix-first — the egg is beaten before it goes onto the rice

– Crack-direct — the egg is cracked straight onto the rice

– Fluffy-style — the egg white is whipped into a meringue, with the yolk placed on top afterward

This author favors the crack-direct method, paired with a soy sauce built on fish stock — oyster soy sauce or pike conger soy sauce among them — for an added layer of umami that fills the mouth the moment it hits the tongue.

Ochazuke

Hot tea, or hot water, poured over rice topped with a chosen ingredient. It is said to have originated in the Edo period as a way to make cold leftover rice palatable while guarding against food poisoning.

Sencha or hōjicha are the standard teas, though dashi broth and even chilled tea have become common more recently. Typical toppings include pickled plum, nori, and salmon.

In Kyoto, the same dish goes by another name: ぶぶ漬け bubuzuke. It also lends its name to an old Kyoto phrase — “Care for some bubuzuke?” — once used, indirectly, to signal that it was time for a guest to leave. The phrase belongs to the past; it is not used in Kyoto today. (Readers interested in Kyoto’s dialect and its indirect turns of phrase may want to read this author’s separate article on the subject.)

Furikake Gohan

Rice topped with ふりかけ furikake, a dry seasoning blend that comes in flavors built around bonito flakes, salmon, egg, and more. It is said to have originated in the early Taishō era as a way to address calcium deficiency; the earliest versions were made from powdered small fish mixed with nori and sesame. Today it is sold in everything from family-size bags to bento-ready single packets.

A furikake memory from this author’s student days. For anyone thinking, “I’d like furikake, but I don’t often eat plain rice” — there is another use for it. As a university student, this author once used furikake in place of salad dressing: a pleasant saltiness with a bit of crunch made for a surprisingly good salad. Family members were startled to learn furikake could be used that way at all.

Later, a television feature on furikake specialty shops showed an overseas visitor saying they wanted to use furikake as a dressing for vegetables — and the memory of that college dinner came rushing back. Watching from the other side of the screen, the reaction was simple: try it, it’s good.

Furikake, in short, is not only for rice. Anyone visiting Japan would do well to find a favorite.

Donburi

A bowl roughly three times the size of an ordinary rice bowl, filled with rice, a topping, and often a sauce. The category is said to trace back to the Edo period, with grilled eel served over rice — 鰻丼 unadon — as its origin point.

Common types include:

– 天丼 Tendon — tempura, such as shrimp or sweet potato, over rice; the same tempura pairs just as well with soba

– 牛丼 Gyūdon — beef and onion simmered in a savory sauce over rice, now a staple of Japanese fast food

– 親子丼 Oyakodon — chicken and egg simmered in a sweet-savory sauce; the name, “parent and child,” refers to the relationship between the chicken and the egg

– 海鮮丼 Kaisendon — a seafood assortment, such as tuna, salmon, or salmon roe, that varies by shop and by the day’s catch

A hot bowl of rice pairs well with almost any seasoning, which is exactly what makes donburi such a direct showcase of what Japanese rice can do.

Sweets and Drinks Made From Rice

Rice does more than feed a meal. Ground or fermented, it also becomes sweets and drinks with their own long histories.

Dango

Rice flour kneaded with water, then either boiled or steamed. Flavors range from sweet red bean paste to mitarashi, a sweet-salty soy glaze. Dango is a fixture of seasonal occasions such as hanami, cherry-blossom viewing, and tsukimi, moon viewing, and typically takes the form of a few rounds skewered on a bamboo stick — kushi dango.

The dango that became a social phenomenon. In 1999, a song called Dango San Kyōdai — “The Three Dango Brothers” — aired on the Japanese children’s program Okāsan to Issho, its melody playing on the near-rhyme between dango and tango. It became enough of a hit that at least one shop known for selling skewers of four dango is said to have switched to three.

Senbei

A dough of ground uruchimai flour, flattened and grilled. Countless flavors and textures are sold today, but the traditional version is glazed with soy sauce and sugar. Its dough-making process resembles dango’s — a resemblance that runs deeper than technique, given how the two are said to be connected by origin.

How senbei got its name. In the Meiji era, a woman known as Osen ran a dango shop in Sōka, then a post-station town on the road leaving Edo. One day, as she was about to throw a batch of stale dango into the river, a passing samurai stopped her and suggested she flatten and grill them instead. The grilled, flattened dango were a hit, and became known — “the dango Osen grilled” — as senbei, 煎餅.

Senbei has even made a cameo in global pop culture: a scene in the hit manga and anime Demon Slayer shows the protagonist Tanjiro making senbei with his siblings.

Sake

Japan’s traditional rice wine, brewed from rice, rice-kōji, and water. It is made using an age-old technique called 並行複発酵 heikō fukuhakkō, parallel multiple fermentation, in which 糖化 tōka — converting the rice’s starch into sugar — and 発酵 hakkō — converting that sugar into alcohol — happen at the same time. The result suppresses unwanted bacterial growth while producing a notably mellow flavor, and the method is considered rare by world standards.

Several styles of sake exist, but to legally be called 日本酒 nihonshu, a sake must meet two conditions: it must be brewed from rice grown in Japan, and it must be produced within Japan.

The rice sake is made from. Sake uses a distinct variety known as 酒米 sakamai, sake rice. It can be cooked and eaten like ordinary rice, though it is less sticky and plainer in flavor than uruchimai, which suits it to dishes like risotto or fried rice that call for a firmer bite; cooking it with a little extra water brings it closer to the familiar chewy texture. Sakamai is mainly a Japonica strain, but its grains are larger than ordinary eating rice and contain a feature called 心白 shinpaku, a white core, not found in table rice — a trait that is said to make it easier for kōji to take hold inside the grain.

Rice Flour, a Rising Alternative

米粉 Komeko, rice ground into flour, was once used mainly for sweets like dango. In recent years, driven by concerns over food self-sufficiency and a growing health-consciousness, it has drawn attention as a substitute for wheat flour.

A few things rice flour can make:

– Bread

– Okonomiyaki

– Meatballs, as a binder

– Gratin and stew, as the base for a white sauce

– Cake

This author has eaten both rice-flour cake and rice-flour bread, and found both enjoyable for the gentle sweetness rice brings to them — the bread especially, for a chewy texture that is distinctly rice’s own.

The name for rice flour also changes with the rice used to make it:

Name — Reading — Made from

|—|—|—|

上新粉 — jōshinko — Uruchimai

白玉粉 — shiratamako — Mochigome

In Closing: A Grain Still Finding New Forms

Rice in Japan continues to do more than feed a meal. Whatever the dish beside it — washoku or Western food, meat or fish — a bowl of hot rice tends to fit right in, and that adaptability is a large part of its appeal.

At the same time, other staples are gaining ground even in Japan; more than one acquaintance of this author has said outright that breakfast, for them, means bread. That shift has raised quiet concern about rice slipping out of daily meals, and it is part of why questions of food self-sufficiency have brought new attention back to rice, from individuals and companies alike.

What can be done to keep Japan’s rice culture intact is a question this author found worth sitting with while writing this article. If it has done anything to introduce readers around the world to the food and the culture rice built in Japan, that alone will have been worth it.

KOTO is a journal of Japanese craftsmanship, culture, and the aesthetic sense behind them.