The Japanese and Rice

In Japan, rice is treated with great importance.
For example, rice, salt, water, and sake are given to the altar, because sake is made from rice.
Also, Kagamimochi (mirror rice cake) is made from rice, although it is rice cake.
I think rice is considered to be special.
Today, it is Shinto-like, but this is part of Japanese culture.

Couldn’t it have been wheat?
There is a big difference in production per area between wheat and rice, about a 1:10 difference in yield per area of arable land. It is said that 1 hectare of wheat is needed for an adult to eat for one year, while only 0.1 hectare is needed for rice.

As you can see from the phrase “one grain ten thousand times more”, the productivity of rice was so outstanding that it must have been considered sacred.

Also, according to the British economist Malthus’s “Population Theory,” wars occur when the rate of food self-sufficiency cannot keep up with the rate of population growth.

The reason why nomadic peoples were able to build great empires with strong warfare is that it takes 50 hectares of land to keep livestock on the grasslands and milk one person to live for a year.

In order to obtain this land, they had to fight many battles and gradually became more and more powerful.

The fact that Japan is a nation with relatively few conflicts and has continued to have an emperor who is said to have a lineage of 10,000 generations has a lot to do with rice cultivation, and I think it is not unrelated to the fact that rice is a large part of Japanese culture and customs.