Introduction Among all the cultivated cereals, rice and wheat are among the most important as the leading food sources for humankind. However, rice is consumed by a higher percentage of people across the globe-almost half of the world’s population. Rice is cultivated in over 100 countries in the world. However, the about 95% of the cultivated crop is not only grown but also consumed in the Asian countries. Research has shown that rice provides for 60% of the food intake in South-East Asia. In the Eastern and Southern parts of Asia, it accounts for 35% of the food intake. The countries that have recorded the highest levels of per capita consumption of rice include Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Laos and Burma. Other parts of the world that have embraced the rice culture include Africa and South America. As far as trade is concerned, rice is one of the most traded basic foodstuffs in the world. Since the introduction of rice in Japan, the Japanese have shown a significant attachment to the cereal in many aspects which it has protected up to date. The origin of rice in Asia The cultivation of rice is a potent symbol of civilisation for many of the Asian nations. According to the preliminary findings by a team of Chinese and Japanese archeologists, the practice of rice cultivation may have first occurred along the middle Yangtze River in central China. A detailed study carried out by an environmental archeologist, Syuichi Toyama, at Japan’s Kogakukan University helped in the clarification of the findings. He surveyed both the published and the unpublished radiocarbon data on 125 samples of rice grains, plant remains as well as impressions of rice grains in pottery for more than a hundred sites along 5400 KM of the Yangtze River (Normile 309). His findings showed that the oldest samples (with a median age of 11, 000 years) are clustered along the middle Yangtze in Hubei and Hunan provinces. This provides evidence that rice cultivation originated from the middle Yangtze River from where it spread to the rest of the Asian countries. In Japan, rice seems to have been cultivated first in the southern island of Kyushu about 2,400 years ago (400BC), presumably having been introduced from the Yangtze region and gradually spread northwards (Latham 2; Jintong 108). The expansion of rice cultivation across the Asian continent continued even in the 20 th century. Although rice had been in Korea for almost 2000 years, it was not the staple food since they depended among other grains and foods. As late as the 1920s, only a third of the cultivated fields were under wet rice-the economy depended on dry rice and field crops like millet and soybean. When the Japanese colonial government carried out a programme to increase rice production in the Korean Peninsula, rice culture reached its fullest development in Korea. The earliest forms of cultivated forms of rice are thought to have been indicas that developed from wild ancestors in the Northern and Eastern India, Northern and South-East Asia and Southern China. Both kinds of rice continued to be grown in China where they were noted in the earliest Chinese dictionary of AD 100 (Totman 96). The colonial powers in Asia had long maintained agricultural research stations. In the 1870s, the Japanese too established agricultural research stations as part of their thrust for modernisation and development. It was that in the 1920s when