History of Electric Rice Cooker in Japan

Before the invention of electric rice cookers, Japanese women suffered while cooking rice on clay stoves, which required at least three hours to cook. Today, I have an electric rice cooker at home, which I can say with absolute certainty is a lot easier than cooking rice on the stove. With a modern electric cooker, you just put the rice and water in and walk away until it's cooked. Indeed, it is arguably one of the greatest products of the 20th century, but the question is, who invented it first? This is a story that takes place between 1951 and 1955, when Toshiba salesman Yamada surveyed Japanese married women in Japan about the process of cooking rice. He identified a lot of problems when it came to cooking rice. In response to his findings, Yoshitada Minami, who was a Toshiba engineer, came up with a series of prototypes for electric rice cookers. In 1956, Toshiba's electric rice cooker hit the Japanese home appliance market. In 1970 alone, around 12,350,000 electric cookers were sold. That was a huge number. Minami's prototype was tested by his wife, Fumiko. She battled away cooking rice all day long, and after he finished each prototype, Fumiko would use it to cook rice up on the roof, under the eaves, and in various other conditions. The early designs were based on a pot sitting atop a pot filled with water, below which was the heat source. The heat source had a switch that could turn off when temperature exceeded 100 degrees Celsius. The resulting circulating steam could cook rice evenly. Today, there are tens of thousands of recipes that an electric rice cooker can cook, including soup, eggs, pasta, cakes, caramel, yogurt, and tofu. The hard work of husband and wife had paid off. The appliance succeeded in greatly reducing the housework burden for Japanese women.