2 days Ago By [email protected] (Mariana Zapata)
The chase for is never-ending, but we wonder if new inventions will ever be as revolutionary as the rice cooker. Yes, is an important life skill. But once you've mastered it, it's so much more convenient to just add rice and water, and let technology work its magic.
So, who can we thank for this wonderful time-saving gadget? A Japanese housewife named Fumiko Minami. This unsung hero spent years of her life tirelessly testing materials, temperatures, and prototypes. If she fell ill, her children took over the experiments so that no time was wasted.
Eventually, in 1955, her husband, Yoshitada Minami, presented the first rice cooker to Toshiba's energetic development manager, Shogo Yamada. The rest, as the cliché says, is history. How did a housewife get enlisted by Toshiba to perfect this invention? Post-World War II Japan continued to be a patriarchal society where women's main expected role was to take care of the household.
Minami was not only married, but had six children, so she certainly was not the first person Toshiba would've recruited for the job. Thankfully, her husband realized that, since women were the ones making rice, they understood the process better than men. Before his wife stepped in, several companies had tried and failed to make electric rice cookers that sold successfully — in part because the men behind them didn't realize the product's most desirable feature: turning off automatically.
How Minami changed rice making forever The problem with early 20th-century electric rice cookers was that they didn't switch off once the rice was ready, so you still had to mind them. This didn't really provide a significant improvement from cooking in traditional kamado stoves, which are heated with wood or charcoal. Early rice cookers relieved women from tending to the fuel, but the difference wasn't enough to convince them to change the way they'd been making rice all of their lives.
Still, since rice is often consumed three times a day in Japan, there was a strong market need for a better rice cooker. After years of experiments, Minami finally came up with a system that has largely remained unchanged: two pots and a switch that turns off the appliance once the temperature reaches 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Toshiba provided the switch technology, Minami experimented, and the first automatic rice cooker was born.
The invention was a massive success in Japan, and quickly became a necessary gadget in any kitchen in the country. From there, it spread to other nations, first in Asia and then in the rest of the world. Today, most people wouldn't think of living without a rice cooker (though ).
And if we're all able to flip a switch or push a button and then walk away from our rice without worries, it's mostly thanks to a very determined inventor who got a rare chance to prove her worth. Recommended.
