1.The Characteristics of Japanese Food Consumption and Rice as a “Staple Food”

Around 350 BC, rice agriculture was introduced to Japan from Asia, and the introduction and spread of rice agriculture replaced the hunter-gatherer economy of of the Jōmon period. It foretold the advent of the Yayoi period of food domestication. The agriculture of Yayoi period laid the foundation for the construction of the Japanese nation-state, and made rice a symbol of its nation-state. Before the introduction of rice, the Japanese planted miscellaneous grains; rice as a staple was confined only to a few elite, and rice agriculture was supported only by the upper classes. However, the peasant uprisings of Early Modern period proved that at least in some parts of Japan, rice played an important role for and had meaning in the diet of farmers. They had rice in their diet which was not just for ritual purposes, because the goal of the peasants was to get the rice from local authorities and local rich people.

当X>X*时，dy1/dt>0,dy2/dt<0,y2=1是演化稳定的结果，即政府激励政策无效，购房者选择购买普通房的概率为1，无购房者自愿购买被动房，或者激励效果不佳，原先选择被动房的购房者变为购买普通房，博弈达到帕累托劣均衡。

During World War II, the domestically grown rice could only be supplied to soldiers on the front line, while others had to consume imported rice or another food substitute. As such, rice was a food that Japanese wanted to have during the periods of food shortages. And, during a time of increased wealth, people began to reduce the amount of rice they bought, and increased the amount of side dishes. Nonetheless, rice remained the main characteristic of the Japanese diet. For the Japanese, rice was a unique staple food. So, it is not the quantity of eaten rice that made rice a staple food. This is because even as the demand for rice declined, the central role of rice in the diet remained unchanged.

2. The Characteristics of the Divine Kingship of Japan and Rice as “Sacrifice”

3. The Awakening of Japanese National Consciousness and Rice as “Self”

Because rice is equated with the gods, rice production and consumption has become a kind of religious behavior, requiring appropriate ritual ceremonies. Early emperors were both the agricultural leaders and sorcerer-religious leaders, and shamans and political leaders. The leader’s power came from his being able to pray to the forces of nature to ensure a good harvest, and the annual harvest ritual legitimized the leader’s power. Therefore, some scholars believed that the emperor of Japan was the main priest for conducting the kokurei(the soul of the grain)ceremony in which he prayed to the deity for the blessing of a good harvest. In this ritual, the god opened a cycle of gift exchange: the god gives his soul to the people by giving people rice, and in return, the people bring new rice to the deity after they reap the harvest from the seeds given to them by the deity—this is a way of cultivating the deity.

由于学生之间存在差异性和多样性，在学习过程中，每个学生具有其特有的意义构建过程。所以，教师不仅要对学生的学习进行管理，更重要的是必须对不同学生进行不同的学习引导，启发每位学生的创新思维。作为学生学习的引导者，教师在执行角色时的行为特征表现在：在审阅每位学生介绍材料的基础上，提出问题，组织学生进行思考和讨论，在讨论中引导学生，启发诱导他们自己去发现规律，同时对自身错误或片面的认识进行纠正或补充，从而加深学生对教学内容的理解；尽量给每位学生同等参与讨论的机会，经常了解学生的意见，随时修正自己在期望值上的偏差。最重要的是，相信每位学生都有学习的潜力，给每位学生创新的机会，引导学生不断地向目标迈进。

学术期刊仅仅从制度和管理上反学术不端行为还不够，必须深入研究反学术不端行为的技术，作到“知己知彼，有的放矢”。

(4)彰显原子结构和元素周期律(表)对无机物的性质和用途的理论支撑。原子的结构决定了元素在周期表中的位置,也决定了元素的性质,借助“结构—位置—性质”三者的神秘关系,可比较顺利地进行元素的推断。同理,常见元素的单质及其重要化合物的结构,也决定了相应物质的物理性质和化学性质,进而决定了相应物质的用途等。利用这层关系推断(或判断)物质的性质和用途的高考试题早已层出不穷。

Rice, as a symbol of Japanese self, evolved through history. Finally the concept of agriculture successfully infiltrated the elite, and the public’s ideas. After the urbanization and industrialization of Japan, the concept of “agricultural Japan” still remained, and served to promote its construction and representation. Rice symbolizes “us”, that is the social group to which someone belongs. Rice paddies symbolize “the land of our ancestors” of individual farmers, reinforcing the collective concept of self through the double metaphors of rice and rice paddies. Throughout Japan’s history, “agricultural Japan”, as a representative of the Japanese, has been defined and redefined; rice and rice paddies became the collective symbol of self of not only the smallest social group, i.e. the home, but also of all Japanese.

Outside of its function as an offering to the gods, rice also has exchange value among the Japanese and served as a medium of exchange. Although both money and rice can be exchanged, the key difference between them is that the money is ambiguous and rice is clear. Money can be clean or dirty, but rice, in the past, was always sacred, and is still clean today, and money can only become clean like rice through a process of sanctification. Therefore, the significance of rice as a medium of exchange is that it retains its original religious and cosmological meaning, that is, kokurei which embodies the spirit of peace of the deity. Rice is also beautiful and symbolizes “good life”. In folktales, people who received rice from a deity had a happy life ever after. And, there are many rituals aimed at ensuring a good harvest for rice and a good life.

第三人干扰婚姻关系引发很多种后果，比如造谣诽谤、当众羞辱、打架斗殴、利用情感骗取钱财、最严重的情形是造成命案、若婚姻关系中的一方配偶的合法权利受到了非法侵害比如人身权或者财产权，那么受害一方配偶可以根据民法或刑法及相关法律保护自己的权利以防第三人的侵害。但是、我国现行法律对于夫妻关系当事人的配偶权被侵犯这一事实无相应的法律救济。第三人干扰婚姻关系的行为导致平等的主体之间自愿建立的婚姻关系中造成无过错一方的物质损失和精神伤害，受害人应当享有针对侵权人的损害赔偿请求权。笔者认为，“第三人”民事赔偿责任的建立，不仅可以使无过错一方得到经济补偿和精神抚慰，同时还能起到预防和惩戒的作用。

Although rice is not a staple food for Japanese in quantitative terms, it is always the main food category used in ritual occasions. Rice “constructs” the Japanese deities, but, rice is not just equated with the deities, but it is equated with the positive power of the gods, namely, nigirimeshi(molded rice). This is the special place where the Rice God differs from the many gods with double attributes and power.

In the folktales and folk religion, rice also shared some themes from the imperial harvest ritual, which can help us understand the meanings of wealth in Japanese cosmology. In these stories, wealth was considered a gift from the gods, and also a part of a deity’s body. This, in turn, presented us with a cosmic sense of equal wealth, namely, it is a gift from a foreign deity living in distant places that will bring luck to the people, and, as such, the origin of rice was interpreted as the gift of self of the deity.

Different from the custom of killing the king described by J.G Frazer in his Golden Bough, the ancient imperial rituals for rice in Japan presented a sacrifice which did not stress “killing”. The Harvest Ritual involved neither victims, nor animal sacrifice, which is totally different from the classical model of sacrifice. Instead of using animal sacrifice, plant foods, namely rice, which represented the gift of “self”, occupied the central position. Moreover, there was no emphasis on how to kill or sacrifice them. Rice became a shared food eaten after the ritual, and eating rice did not mean killing the deity. So, the rebirth of the Japanese king did not rely on the violent death of the king.

The Japanese encountered “others” throughout history. This prompted them to continue to redefine the “self”, and conceptualize their concept of self, and, in the course of communications with “others”, to redefine their concept of self as a nation, i.e. who they are. Because the concept of self is always defined in the course of connecting with others, in the discourse of self and others, rice is a powerful vehicle for the Japanese to use in defining who they are when they have relationships with others. Japan’s encounter with two civilizations had a profound and lasting impact and influence on them. The first occurred when they encountered the highly developed civilization of the Tang China during the 5 th - 7 th centuries, and the second when they encountered western civilization at the end of 19th century. In these two encounters, the Japanese were conquered, but, were eager to learn and imitate them.

While the Japanese were eagerly adopting the “outside” civilization, they were also actively protecting their own culture, and defending their identity and concept of self. The issue of rice is not a separate economic and consumer problem for the Japanese, but an important political and economic issue. Among academic circles in Japan, national scholars always showed the original position of “yearning”; the mainstream view still focused on the countryside, i.e. to build an “Agriculture Myth”, and in times of crisis strengthened this yearning. The Japanese have not only regarded rice as just a food to eat; rice has affected every aspect of national life. Rice molded the cultural prototype of Japan. Japan’s agriculture is based on rice, and centered around rice. Rice is not only a symbol of the Japanese self, but also of the land, water and air of Japan. In Japanese culture, one of the important dimensions of rice symbolism is that rice paddies represent agriculture, countryside and the past, and, finally represents the Japanese state and nation. The connection between rice and space and time makes it very different from other crops, and it has always been a symbol of Japanese self. Rice embodies Japanese history.

Japanese nationalism depended on and was generated by its encounter with “the other”, and this expresses how Fredrik Barth describes the process of ethnic differentiation. However, we should be aware that when the Japanese confronted different “others” in history, it has always repeatedly done so by taking rice as the metaphor of self-reconfiguration of “self”, and this was repeated in order to define a crystallization process of self that wasignored by Barth in Ethnic Group and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference”. Therefore, the discussions found in Rice as Self are a good complement to Barth’s theory of the differentiation of ethnic groups.

4.Discussions: The Purity of Rice and the Brightness of Cherry Blossoms

The crystallization process of the nationalism represented by rice is associated with the purity of rice, and this concept of purity is deeply rooted in the concept of self. When the metaphor of self-identity is threatened, then rice must be recalled for the sake of self-renewal. Therefore, in all the encounters of the self and others, rice and rice paddies are seen as carriers when the Japanese examine the changing of their self-identity into a collective self, and also as the internal resources of the ever-changing purity of the self.

It is worth noting that, based on the investigation of the emperor’s rites related to rice, the study of rice sacrifice by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney make us rethink the nature of kingship. The emperor in contemporary Japan is no longer a symbol of Japan. Since modern times, the symbolic meaning of the rice and kingship has been eliminated completely from “imagined kingship”. In looking at Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s research on cherry blossoms—the reason why cherry blossoms were able to become a symbol of Japanese nationalism during the era of nationalism is clearly due to the fact that they have a close link with the position of the emperor who represents the whole country of Japan. This is totally different from the gradual recession of the kingship’s link with the symbolic meaning of rice. The image of the cherry blossom is widely used. In the both individual and collective aspects, cherry blossoms have become the symbol of the Japanese self, and especially the symbol of soldiers who sacrifice their lives on the behalf of the emperor. The glory of the emperor was equivalent to the glory of empirical Japan. The mobilization of this aesthetic reached its climax during the actions of the kamikaze pilots. As such, cherry blossoms eventually were adopted as the symbol of Japanese nationalism by Japanese militarism. This is what Benedict Anderson discussed in his Imagined Communities when he talks about the emotional and cultural factors behind nationalism.

Key Words:rice symbolism; metaphor of self; identity; nationalism

References:

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Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney. zuowei ziwo de daomi: ribenren chuangyue shijian de shenfen rentong(Rice as self: Japanese Identities through Time). Shi Feng,transl. Zhejiang: zhejiang daxue chubanshe,2015.

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