Rice is
good. Rice is
life. If you want to
get a life, just eat rice!
Over half the world eats rice as their dietary staple. I eat the rest. Rice is different from country to country, county to county, field to field. Do as you want, live as you want to live. But I recommend that when you have Chinese food, eat Chinese rice. When you have Japanese food, eat Japanese rice. When you have Indian food, don't eat basmati rice because it feels like wax candle shavings. Ack!
Japanese white rice is especially nice. Nothing is sexier than Japanese white rice so don't bother to tell me differently. There are many Japanese words for rice. A very common one is "gohan". This is also the word for a meal. Why? Obviously, if you have not eaten rice, you have not eaten. (Although I like noodles too.)
So, what other things can we say about rice? Well, rice is sometimes called "kome", but a rice plant is called "ine" (pronounced like "E-nay"). Rice straw is called "ine-wara" or "ina-wara" or just simply as "wara". In the good old days, "wara" was not thrown out but was considered to be precious material for making footware, rain coats, snow coats, floor mats, headwares, toys and crafts to name a few. It was (and is) used for making ropes, including the knotted ropes you see at any sacred area in Japanese Shinto tradition. These ropes are called "shime-nawa", and ropes in general are called "nawa". The tightly knit and strong ropes are called "tsuna" and the sacred ropes worn by the strongest Japanese sumo wrestlers known as "Yokozuna" are also called "yokozuna". The meaning of the word "yokozuna" is "horizontal rope", but you don't say "yoko-nawa", just "yoko-zuna". This probably has something to do with "Yoko-nawa" not sounding strong enough for the top ranked big fat sweaty sumo wrestlers. By convention, the usual spelling is "yokozuna" but to reflect traditional Japanese pronunciation, it could be spelled as "yokodzuna" since the "dzuna" part derived from the word "tsuna" and in the kana writing system, "dzu" is written as a letter "tsu" with two dots. The word "tsuna" is pronounced flatly. If you put the accent on the first syllable, it will sound like tuna fish to Japanese and they will look at you and smile and nod and think you are an idiot. In Japanese "tuna" is "maguro", as sushi geeks know, but Japanese call tinned tuna fish "Tsuna" with the accent on the first syllable.
Uhhhh. I digress. Anyway rice is very very good.