Masaaki-sama’s Sacred Word Rice is the body of Jesus—Cooking rice with complete focus and commitment— The moment rice is polished, it dies. If brown rice is left as is without polishing, it carries the power to germinate and it is still living. Every morning, my wife scoops brown rice from the storage box, measures it and then brings it to the rice polishing machine. She puts the brown rice into the machine, then comes the moment of rice polishing. This is the very moment that the rice is killed, that we take away the life of the rice. Once you polish the rice, there is not even a second to delay, an instant to be wasted. As soon as the polishing is finished, the rice goes immediately into water for soaking. As soon as the soaking is finished, the rice is immediately cooked. When I say “immediately,” I mean exactly that. Just how quickly can the polished rice be soaked; how instantly can rice be put on the heat after it has soaked—every day, my wife approaches this process with complete focus and commitment. Once polished, rice begins to oxidize immediately, by the second. Oxidation is, as all of you know, like rust or getting old. If the rice that we eat every day is oxidizing, then it is only natural that our bodies will also oxidize. They will only get rusty. They will only get old. Thinking about the health and lives of the family, my wife places importance on just how quickly she can soak and cook freshly polished rice. How one handles grains that Meishu-sama says are the king of nutrition can determine the quality of the meals of that day. I believe Mami approaches the cooking of rice with this kind of thought on a daily basis. Because the food that we eat every day becomes our flesh and blood, our blood determines our mood, and our mood has an enormous influence on our future lives,and still more, because the staple food of we Japanese is rice,I don’t think it is too much to say that the way we cook our rice on a daily basis determines our lives. For us Japanese, the daily act of cooking rice in a clay pot is the center of our lives, a pillar. This is the way it should be. I believe that if one is not able to seriously undertake this task, their livelihood, relationships, their life, goes off course and they cannot become truly happy. Meishu-sama says that grains are the main part of the meal and to take great pains to prepare accompanying dishes is mistaken. So this also means that before you say, “Vegan food takes too much time and effort,” “I don’t know what to serve with the rice!” or “There’s not enough dishes,” what is most important is taking a serious, honest look at rice that is our main source of nutrition. Before saying things like “I’ll eat salad because I’m vegan” or “I want to learn all kinds of vegan recipes,” I believe that Meishu-sama is saying that it is first necessary to turn all our energy towards properly cooking rice. So for all of you who are practicing the Japanese vegan diet, I would love for you, if it is possible, to get a hold of brown rice and calculate from the time you eat how long it will take to polish, soak and cook rice in a clay pot without wasting even a second, and turn all your energy and attention toward this task that at one glance seems so simple. The anticipation you feel as you wait for the rice to cook in a clay pot, the rice that you gave your full attention to; the uplifting feeling you get when the rice is done and you open the lid; and then the emotion you feel when you actually eat it—it transcends language, and this, this is the moment that reigns at the very peak of life’s joys. I cannot help but think this. Moreover, humans do not live on bread alone, so just as Jesus’s twelve disciples took the bread from Jesus at the last supper and ate it as his body, let us Japanese eat rice in our daily meals not as physical matter, but through it, receive the resurrected body of Jesus. I would like for us to have these kinds of sacred meals, this Lord’s Supper, these precious meals daily, with humility. Why? For the Japanese, the body and blood of Jesus are not bread and wine, but rice and miso soup.