Japan has coin-operated public rice-polishing machines, and they’re super easy to use

A quick, easy, and cool way to turn genmai into white rice…or shichibuzuki.

The price of rice has been rising at a crazy rate in Japan, with supermarkets charging about 50 percent more than they did just a year ago. So our Japanese-language reporter Masanuki Sunakoma was very happy when some of his relatives gave him a bag of rice as a gift, but also in a bit of a bind, because it was a bag of genmai.

Genmai is what Japan calls unpolished brown rice, meaning that the inedible husk has been removed from the grains, but all of the bran and germ are still present. You can eat genmai, but it’s bitterer and drier than white rice, which many people don’t think pairs well with traditional Japanese dishes. In order to turn genmai into the far more popular white rice, you need to “polish” the rice, grinding or buffing away the bran and germ and leaving just the starchy white core.

▼ Masanuki’s bag of genmai

Obviously, it’s way too much work to polish individual grains of rice by hand, which is why rice farmers/distributors have machines to do the task for them. Rice polishers aren’t something that ordinary people in Japan have as home kitchen appliances, though, so what was Masanuki to do?

Use a coin-operated rice polisher.

Though you won’t spot them in the big city very often, if you head out into the rural-adjacent suburbs in Japan you’ll start to find coin-operated rice polishers. Some of these are located inside supermarkets or at car washes, but there are also dedicated rice polishing facilities that are open to the public. They’re generally simple, no-frills setups, kind of like laundromats. From the outside, the one Masanuki found near his apartment also sort of reminded him of a hut or lodge you might stay in on an overnight hike.

A sign above the entrance boasted that the machine can polish 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of rice in just four and a half minutes, so it would definitely be up to the task of polishing Masanuki’s five-kilo bag of rice.

Stepping inside the polishing room, Masanuki learned that the price is very reasonable too, just 100 yen (US$0.68) per 10 kilograms of rice. Despite how big and specialized the machine is, it’s actually very simple to use. Just insert your coins in the slot…

…pour in your rice…

…and press the button to select the degree to which you want your rice to be polished. The machine Masanuki used offered three options: regular white rice (標準), extra-polished rice (上白), and 70-percent polished (7ぶつき), which leaves some of the bran behind. Intrigued by the 70-percent option, Masanuki decided to give it a try.

Once you press the button, the process starts, with the grains filling a tank as they’re polished.

Once the polishing is done, stepping on a foot pedal opens up the bottom of the tank so that you can get your polished rice back into your bag.

70-percent polished rice, which is called shichibuzuki in Japanese, is lighter in color than genmai, but darker than white rice.

But what Masanuki really wanted to know was how it would taste. You can make shichibuzuki in a regular rice cooker, but it’s recommended to use a little more water than you would for the same amount of white rice.

Once the cooking cycle was done, Masanuki dished himself up a bowl of shichibuzuki, and was surprised to find that the texture was only a little firmer than white rice, and the flavor wasn’t very far off at all.

By the way, if you’re wondering what happened to the bran and germ that was removed from Masanuki’s rice, they don’t get thrown out. Instead, the collective polished-off powder is stored at in the facility and is available for anyone to take, free of charge, to use as a bathwater additive, deodorizer, or fertilizer.

Unfortunately, Masanuki didn’t think to take any home with him, so we’ll have to wait until his next rice polishing run for his bran bath impressions.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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