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 2.
