C. von Verschuer
the “Regulations of the Engi Era” (Engishiki, promulgated in 927 ce) give information on tax
deliveries from the provinces to the Nara and Heian capitals. Every year the imperial court
collected the tax cargoes of foods from sixty- eight provinces. Apart from official or adminis-
trative data, poets from the tenth to twelfth centuries mentioned their favorite natural prod-
ucts in waka verses. Together these sources describe a variety of edible plants. We can give
some examples from about a total two hundred edible plants that are registered in the “Regu-
lations of the Engi Era.”^8
These plants provide the full range of vegetable foods of medieval Japan. In fact, they remained
the base of the Japanese diet well beyond the medieval period, as can be seen in the agricultural
calendars of the Edo period. For example, the “Illustrated Agricultural Calendar” (Nōgyō zue)
drafted by Tsuchiya Matasaburō (1642–1719), a manager of lands owned by the Maeda family in
Kaga province (now Ishikawa prefecture), illustrates local practises in that region. The calendar
shows that a variety of plants were cropped, mostly in spring or summer, and that, in contrast,
wheat and barley followed an opposite pattern: they were cropped in autumn after the rice
harvest, and were harvested in spring, when rice had only started to grow. This means that grain
food was available even after the reserves of rice had run out in spring.^9
The cultural primacy of rice: an invented tradition
The conventional theory of a Japanese “rice- growing civilization” (inasaku bunka) understands
irrigated rice cultivation as the foundation of Japanese culture and as a distinctive feature of the
Japanese society. Yet this assumption is based on what Eric Hobsbawm describes as an “Invented
Tradition.”^10 The Japanese image of the primacy of rice can be dated to the late nineteenth
century. It appears, for instance, in a public announcement, published by the Japanese govern-
ment after the enthronement of the Meiji Emperor in 1868, on the occasion of the first Thanks-
giving Ritual (Niinamesai) of the new reign. The announcement says:
In accordance with the will of the great goddess Amaterasu Ōmikami, rice, in our Empire,
is a food that comes from a fine green plant. It was rice that the goddess had planted in her
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to earth. We shall never forget this divine favor. Moreover, in order to ward off droughts
and tempests, monarchs have continued, from generation to generation since Emperor
Jinmu, to celebrate the offering of the new grain harvest to the heavenly and earthly gods,
on the second day of the hare in the eleventh month. This has continued for three thousand
years.^11This announcement features a link between rice, the goddess Amaterasu, and the imperial lineage.
The event of the Thanksgiving Ritual inaugurated also the “restoration” of thirteen “ancient”
rituals that celebrated the imperial lineage—eleven of which were in fact new creations by the
Meiji government.^12
Twentieth- century imperialism further boosted religious state rituals and mythology, with
rice continuing its career as a national symbol. To the anthropologist Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962),
rice played a decisive role in the origin and originality of the Japanese people. From the 1930s to
the 1950s, he stated his conviction that the rituals and beliefs surrounding rice were associated
with the presence of a rice spirit, and he drew attention to the predominance of rice in ritual,
mythology, and diet. Yanagita’s theories influenced subsequent generations until today.^13
For example, the myth of the “Descent to earth of the divine grandson” in the “Chronicles of
Japan” (Nihon shokim 720), according to all modern editions, tells of the “Heavenly Grandson,”