Rice cookers and the lives of women in Asia
Payal Kapadia, director of the acclaimed new film All We Imagine As Light, has a more ambiguous view of rice cookers. Prabha, one of the nurses who are the central characters, receives one as a gift from her husband, who disappeared to Germany years ago. It is both impressive — “so international”, her flatmate Anu exclaims — and impractical, too large for their tiny apartment or the meals they make.
It is an appliance for a large family, of the kind that Prabha was denied by her husband’s absence. Kapadia has pointed out in interviews that such devices are marketed as being Pable to change a woman’s life, but “not that you could go to work now, but that you will take better care of your family”. Prabha has achieved a career and life on her own terms, yet the cooker can make her yearn for the life she could have had.
This ambiguity has always been part of the rice cooker. The need was obvious, Japanese women had to wake early and spend hours tending pots on wood-fired stoves to cook perfect rice. Yet, as Helen Macnaughten notes in her essay on the development of rice cookers, senior managers at Toshiba were initially disinclined to support the project because they “believed that a woman who wanted to sleep rather than cook rice was a failure…”
Electric cookers already existed for institutional use, but had to be watched carefully since they easily burned or overcooked rice. Toshiba gave the project to a subcontractor, Minami Yoshitada, who enlisted his wife, Fumiko. She experimented endlessly, with different
