All About Japanese Rice

Most of the so-called “sushi rice” in America is a variety called Calrose, grown in California. It’s part of a broader family of rice called japonica, a style known for short, squat, sticky grains. Other types of rice, including arborio and Bhutanese red rice, are part of this family and have rich histories and culinary traditions. But for this story we wanted to investigate a trend we’re seeing. Japanese-style rice grown in and imported from Japan is becoming increasingly popular in the United States, and we wanted to learn more about this growing category. For brevity’s sake, we’ll refer to it as Japanese rice going forward, regardless of where it’s grown. 

Circana, a Chicago-based market research firm, helped us identify the top-selling products in the United States. Culinary experts, historians, and authors helped us round out our lineup with smaller artisanal brands. We ended up with 19 short-grain varieties, a combination of white rice, brown rice, and a sweet variety called mochigome. Some were supermarket standbys, such as Kokuho Rose and Nishiki, while others were specialty products ordered via online retailers. We included Calrose as a point of comparison because it’s the best-selling brand of this kind of rice in the United States.

Test kitchen staffers and Japanese American chefs and restaurateurs evaluated each rice on flavor and texture. From pearly, luscious Koshihikari to sticky-sweet mochigome, we saw a category with more breadth and depth than “a plain bowl of rice” may imply. We dug deep to learn more about the history of Japanese-style rice, how it’s grown and processed, and which products stood out as must-trys. Read on to learn more.

The first rice in East Asia, also known as Oryza sativa L., was cultivated in China and then spread to Korea and on to Japan, emerging on the southern island of Kyūshū as a new subvariety called Oryza japonica. The exact timing is murky, but Eric Rath, food historian and author of Oishii: The History of Sushi (2021), said rice arrived in Japan three to four thousand years ago. In the 1880s, some of these japonica varieties made their way to the United States to feed Chinese railroad workers in California, according to Robin Koda, third-generation rice farmer at Koda Farms. 

Calrose, the most popular variety of Japanese-style rice in the United States, was developed in the early 1900s and released in 1948. Other interesting evolutions of japonica have emerged stateside, such as Kokuho Rose, a crossbreed of a Persian long-grain and a short-grain rice, launched in California in the 1960s. Nishiki, a hybrid of Kokuho Rose and M-401, a medium-grain rice variety, was released in California in 1981. (California is the number two rice-producing state in the United States, behind only Arkansas, where long-grain rice dominates.) 

Agriculture in general has a strong history of crossbreeding to create strains with different qualities, and rice is no exception. Due to crossbreeding with longer varieties, the California rice tended to have longer grains than the Japanese varieties in our lineup. However, the terms “short-grain” and “medium-grain” are not regulated, so you may see both California- and Japanese-grown rice labeled with these terms. All of the rice we tasted was shorter in length than long-grain varieties such as basmati or jasmine.

All white rice starts off as brown rice, including Japanese-style varieties. After harvesting, the hulls of the rice kernels are removed and grains of brown rice emerge. To produce white rice, the germ and bran that give brown rice its color are polished away by a machine process called milling. Mochigome rice starts with a purple or red-colored outer hull that is then milled away, revealing pearly white grains. 

In Japan, customized milling is common—dialing in the exact percentage of bran and germ removed so that “the resulting grains retain both the characteristics of brown and white rice,” according to Jun Mattison, assistant manager of The Rice Factory in Scarsdale, New York. This allows you to balance the hearty, nutty notes of brown rice with white rice’s soft texture and sweet flavor to your exact preference. The Rice Factory’s mills, like many of those in Japan, can remove anywhere from 10 to 100 percent of the bran, depending on the customer’s preference. 

Though such customization isn’t commonly available in the United States yet, there’s a growing interest among rice connoisseurs, and specialty shops such as The Rice Factory ship custom-milled rice.

Most of what you find in stateside stores and online has had either all of the bran (white rice) or none of the bran (brown rice) removed.

We’ve listed the varieties we tried (Japanese imports first, followed by American-grown options) with tasting notes, noting our favorites to try in each category. Look for them at stores such as Maruichi, 99 Ranch, and H Mart, as well as online from The Rice Factory, Nijiya Market, and even Amazon. If you’re interested in custom milling, check out The Rice Factory.