It is quite an interesting video as while washing his rice he chats away about life in Japan. He uses an old fashioned Japanese rice cooker unlike the electronic varieties available today.

I made my own video about how to wash rice which you might be more useful if you have a modern Micom rice cooker.

What is the best Japanese rice cooker?

There are many companies that produce rice cookers including Panasonic, Sharp and Sanyo. However when you ask a Japanese person what rice cooker they have, the most popular answer that you are likely to hear is Zojirushi. Interestingly enough, this company may not be as well known in the West as the three preceding ones. However in the rice cooking field, Zojirushi is the market leader in Japan. I was fortunate enough to be given a rice cooker by my landlord when I first arrived in Japan. It was actually a Zojirushi. Many people consider these to be the best rice cookers. At that time, I was under the impression that this must have been a crappy brand and he’d found someone to dump it on. So you can imagine my surprise when I found out Zojirushi is the top dog!

Zojirushi NS-ZCC10

The picture above is the Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 rice cooker. This model is for sale overseas. At first glance this might not be obvious. However all the buttons are in English! The rice cooker I use is similar to the one above although it is a slightly older model. It is the same except that mine does not come with the Neuro Fuzzy® technology. Zojirushi claim that their Neuro Fuzzy® logic technology allows their rice cookers to think for themselves and make tiny adjustments, when necessary, to temperature and heating time so that they cook perfect rice every time. However although my Zojirushi rice cooker doesn’t have this feature, I find that I am able to cook perfect rice easily. If you would like to buy a Zojirushi NS-ZCC10 rice cooker, please check out the reviews on this site.

EDIT: I have now purchased a new Japanese rice cooker which is even higher quality than the one featured on this page. My new machine is a Zojirushi NP-GD05 which is only available in Japan. It is the equivalent to the Zojirushi NP-GBC05 which is sold across North America.