Last Day in Tokyo I decide to see some of the rice country, on the way to the plane.

Rice is the single most important food in the Japanese culture and I wanted to see where some was grown. Japanese rice refers to a number of short-grain cultivars of Japonica rice including ordinary rice (uruchimai) and glutinous rice (mochigome).

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Ordinary Japanese rice, or uruchimai is the staple of the Japanese diet and consists of short a grain rice.

When cooked it has a sticky texture such that it can easily be picked up and eaten with chopsticks.

Outside Japan it is sometimes labeled sushi rice, as this is one of its common uses.

It is also used to produce sake.

Sake is a Japanese rice wine made by fermenting rice that has been polished to remove the bran. Unlike wine, in which alcohol (ethanol) is produced by fermenting sugar that is naturally present in grapes, sake is produced by a brewing process more like that of beer, where the starch is converted into sugars, before being converted to alcohol.