As the Japanese increasingly turn away from rice, the longtime staple of their diet, baker Koichi Fukumori believes he has found a solution to boost the heavily subsidized crop: Turn it into bread.
The crispy baguettes coming out of Fukumori's ovens look and taste just like the bread the Japanese have grown to love, but there is one big difference. More than 80 percent of his bread is made of rice.
"This is the only way to survive for rice farmers," Fukumori said.
A range of bread made out of rice is offered at his shop, Aoimugi ("Green Wheat"), at a bread theme park that opened Thursday in one of Japan's largest shopping malls, LaLaport, near Tokyo.
Fukumori, who studied under star French baker Raymond Calvel, spent four years developing rice bread at the request of Japan's agriculture ministry to help shore up rice consumption.
"I grew up seeing farmers growing rice," he said. "I thought making bread out of rice would help them out."
More than 70 schools in western Japan have already introduced the rice bread, which also includes wheat gluten.
"If rice bread is used for school meals, it provides long-term support for [farmers]," he said. "It is also important for children to eat food made of locally grown rice."
While it may not be an advertisement for consumers, Fukumori notes that for farmers, there are only advantages to introducing rice bread, as it uses not premium rice but grains that would otherwise be wasted.
The theme park is called the Tokyo Panya (bakery) Street, a collection of eight popular bakeries operated by individuals dubbed "super boulangers" and serving bread fresh from the oven.
The park producer, the Namco entertainment group, bills the area as "a Northern European town in the countryside," with a water wheel going round and the taped chirping of birds playing in the background.
It is the 15th food theme park operated by Namco but the first focusing on bread, which is gradually replacing rice as a staple Japanese food. The park aims to draw 1.5 million visitors in its initial year.
Food theme parks are mushrooming around Japan, focusing on a variety of food ranging from ramen noodles and curry to Western-style cakes and Chinese dumplings.
"Nobody hates to eat," a Namco official said.
"A company boss can hardly ask a subordinate out to Disneyland, but it would be easier to ask someone to come to this park together," she said, explaining the bread park's potential niche.
Some of the customers at Tokyo Panya Street say that bread has completely replaced rice in their diets.
"I don't have any stock of rice at home and have thrown away my rice cooker," said Masako Watanabe, who heads a 3,000-strong bread-lovers' group.
"Bread is convenient," she said. "You can step into a bakery and choose whatever you want from a wide variety, while rice is always the same white thing. You can have bread as a snack or for dinner," she said.
Annual rice consumption in Japan has fallen to a postwar low as different foods enter Japanese kitchens and working women opt for quicker-to-serve bread or pasta meals, according to the farm ministry.
Japanese people ate an average 59.5kg of rice (in terms of uncooked weight) at home or restaurants in the year ended in March 2004.
It was the first time the figure has dropped below 60kg and is a fraction of the peak per-capita consumption of over 110kg in 1963.
Spending on bread rose to ?27,954 (US$266 dollars) per household in 2004 from ?22,100 in 1981, while spending on rice slumped to ?37,934 from ?71,803 over the same 23-year period, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communication.
The tradition of rice, however, has ensured that rice farming remains one of Japan's most protected industries, with rice farmers heavily subsidized and Japan fighting tooth and nail against opening up to mass imports of the crop.
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