ice. In Japan some enterprising
person has started selling bottled stuff made from the part of the
rice grain that is rubbed off in the polishing process. It does not
look appetising. An easier thing would be to leave some of the coating
on the rice. One thinks of what Smollett said of white bread:

"They prefer it to wholesome bread because it is whiter. Thus they
sacrifice their health to a most absurd gratification of a misjudging
eye, and the tradesman is obliged to poison them in order to live."

Although, for economy's sake, a considerable amount of barley is eaten
with or instead of rice, it may be said in a general way that the
Japanese people, like so many millions of other Asiatics, have rice
for breakfast, rice for lunch and rice for dinner. If they have
anything to eat between meals it is as like as not to be rice cakes---
to the foreigner's taste a loathly, half-cooked compost of rice flour
or pounded rice and water, a sort of tepid underdone muffin. We in the
West have bread at every meal as the Japanese have rice, but we eat
our bread not only as plain bread but as toast and bread-and-butter;
we also ring the changes on brown, white and oat bread.

Among the covered lacquer dishes on the little table set before each
kneeling breakfaster, luncher or diner in Japan there is one which is
empty. This is the rice bowl. When the meal begins--or in the case of
an elaborate dinner at the rice course--the maid brings in a large
covered wooden copper-bound or brass-bound tub or round lacquered box
of hot rice. This rice she serves with a big wooden spoon, the only
spoon ever seen at a Japanese meal. A man may have three helpings or
four in a bowl about as big as a large breakfast cup. The etiquette is
that, though other dishes may be pecked at, the rice in one's bowl
must be finished. The usage on this point may have originated in the
feeling that it was almost impious to waste the staple food of the
country. It is not difficult to pick up the last rice grains with the
wooden _hashi_ (chopsticks), for the rice is skilfully boiled. (Soft
rice is served to invalids only.) But when the bowl is almost empty
the custom is to pour into it weak tea or hot water, and then to drink
this, so getting rid of the odd grains. It is through omitting to
drink in this way that foreigners get indigestion when at a Japanese
meal they eat a lot of rice.

At first it is not easy for the foreigner to believe that people can
come wit