What to think of the Rice Theory of the Japanese Character

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:01]They've been growing rice in central Japan for 3,000 years. It's always been a pretty complicated business and remains so to this day.

[00:00:11]Seeds will only germinate properly if they've been sitting for many months in a sunlit pool of water at least 5 cm deep, but the stalks can only be harvested when the water has been drained and they've been able to dry out for a few weeks.

[00:00:25]All this makes for an unholy degree of complication.

[00:00:28]It means that rice generally has to be grown in terraces facing the sun with water flowing down the hillside through a well-managed network of sluices and dikes. There has to be an upper terrace that functions as a reservoir or holding pond and an extremely detailed agreement between all the farmers as to when their particular terrace will be ready to receive or be drained of water.

[00:00:51]The whole community needs a firm grasp of hydrodynamics, a law-abiding nature, and a highly punctual and disciplined outlook.

[00:01:01]When trying to understand the particularities of the Japanese character, sociologists in the 20th century focused in on what is famously come to be known as the rice theory, which states that a nation whose diet has for centuries depended on rice will develop many of the qualities that are necessary for its successful cultivation.

[00:01:23]These sociologists proposed that the Japanese are the way they are, thorough, collaborative, precise, traditional, focused on the we rather than the I, principally because of the virtues a majority of them had to exercise to bring in the harvest. The rice terraces of places like Maruyama Senmaida molded the national character.

[00:01:46]Conversely, the same sociologists have proposed that the characteristics of many Western nations, individualistic, impatient, self-reliant, and innovative, have been the consequence of their cultivation of a very different plant, wheat.

[00:02:03]However fanciful these two theories might sound, they point us to the idea that far more than we're normally prepared to recognize, our jobs don't just occupy our energies, they shape our personalities.

[00:02:18]Teaching children all day will give us one sort of temperament, designing advertising campaigns another.

[00:02:25]Politicians might speak one way over the dinner table, psychotherapists another.

[00:02:30]All this can open up an avenue for compassion.

[00:02:33]The regrettable awfulness of many people won't necessarily always be their fault.

[00:02:39]It may be a function of the work they found themselves having to do.

[00:02:43]If people in the television industry are, for example, often disloyal, paranoid, unreliable, and insincere, this may have far more to do with the vagaries of their industry than of anything fixed in their natures. If we gave them a rice field to cultivate in a picturesque village south of Osaka, some water sluices to manage, and some neighbors to depend on, they might, in time, grow exceptionally calm, collaborative, and forbearing.

[00:03:11]Similarly, at a state level, the atmosphere of many modern countries, their ruthlessness, immaturity, aggression, and exhibitionism, may ultimately be a function of the way most of their citizens have to earn their living rather than of any drastic deterioration in human nature.

[00:03:30]Japan's rice theory asks us to explain and then perhaps one day reform our characters by looking in an unfamiliar and often painful place, at who our jobs ask us to be every working day.