PRESENTER:

The familiar rice cooker —– humble in appearance, but hiding a fascinating story.

Yokoyama Ikko is lead curator for design and architecture. She told us how everyday objects like this can often reflect dramatic shifts in society. The invention of the first automatic rice cooker, for instance, had a now unimaginably positive impact on many women’s lives in 1950s Japan.

YOKOYAMA IKKO:

Traditionally, cooking rice was a labour intensive and time-consuming task for women at home. So, one of the heaviest tasks, they have to go up early in the morning to start cooking breakfast and also continuously have to monitor the woodstove. And also imagine they’ve been doing three times a day. That means, like, if you need two hours’ preparation, then it's six hours. The women’s life goes to just cooking rice.

PRESENTER:

In freeing up home cooks from this all-consuming labour, the rice cooker also played a key role in saving Japan’s war-torn economy.

YOKOYAMA IKKO:

Yeah, the product was really fitting; right timing for the societal change because it's the post-war reconstruction, everybody was really coming back from hell, it was devastated, the country has lost. So, they have to bring back the economy, health, joy, the meaning to life and everything.

So, what I mean is the rice cooker facilitated the change because of the economic boom. So, everybody started becoming more busy and efficient citizens and the people, they want to work, they want [to] earn money. They don't want to spend six hours just making fire, cooking rice. That's not very productive.

And then also women start to see the potential they want to go out and they want to have own profession. This was a female relief, but it's also matching product to the societal change.

PRESENTER:

What’s more, this portable little kitchen has stood the test of time, thanks to a design that’s as ingenious as it is simple.

YOKOYAMA IKKO:

This one was design-wise very, very sophisticated. The outside of the rice cooker is very clean white, mimicking almost the porcelain when you eat the rice, the porcelain ceramic. It's not like typical kitchen utility: you can bring it to the living room. If you've got guests coming, you can bring it out: there's a little handle to it. And also, there's this black little switch, it can operate by one finger, just sliding the switch down to start. Yeah, it's kind of very elegantly illustrated.

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