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A very similar looking model made by Hitachi (Japan) became famous in the 70s in Louisiana. Literally every single household practically had one as rice was inc

• walterbell 3y ago
  > Toshiba washing machine salesman discovered that washing clothes was less trouble for Japanese women than the task of preparing three rice-based meals a day. When the salesman proposed the idea of an automatic rice cooker to an engineer, who did not know how to cook rice, the engineer’s wife Fumiko Minami set herself to the task—developing the model still at the base of the appliance almost a century later. Another historical tidbit, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-cooker-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-cooker-history > In 1945, while war-torn Japan faced years of rebuilding, an engineer named Masaru Ibuka opened a radio workshop ...Ibuka wrote down the words that would become iconic to the company that in 1958 would become known as Sony: “Purpose of incorporation: Creating an ideal workplace, free, dynamic, joyous.” ... Ibuka’s engineers lived in post-war Japan. Their payment for fixing radios often partly consisted of uncooked rice. This led to the fledgling company’s very first invention. Instead of a sleek radio, it was an electric rice cooker.