[steven]

I've heard of rice being uncommon during the war... but I meant during the post war occupation period, which I should've further clarified as being during the early 50's (like during the korean "conflict" and all that). That's when I would suspect a lot of weird loan words came from, as some of them seem a bit old fashioned from my perspective. Again, this is all speculation though.

I always thought that the soy-sauce on white rice came from chinese food as well... but just recently I thought that maybe it could've come from Japan.

The whole white rice/brown rice thing was something new to me too. The first time I had brown rice was at a study abroad student friend of mine's apartment a few years back in California. Just last year I helped my friend take her rice to the "senzai", which was completely shocking to me as I didn't even know that process existed. Since then I've planted some rice and I've cut a little bit of rice (the old fashioned way with a sickle). I can't imagine how expensive white rice must've been back in the day! The process of turning brown rice into white rice is simple now but man it would've been painstaking work back then.

I wonder if chinese food in america/california always came with white rice. I know you can get white rice now... but I wonder if it was always like that. I suspect the chinese food I ate in california was made with california-mai (CA Rice). I'm starting to confuse myself now-- I guess I should ask if Chinese people put soy sauce on their rice, or if they did back in the day?

EDIT: Ishikawa-- I understand what you mean. It's not very good if it's too slimey and the flavor isn't there. If you have really high quality eggs and good rice, it's surprisingly good, though. The egg makes a huge difference. It's definitely not something I would've done when I lived in California and frankly I don't think I could handle it as well with a regular old store bought egg. Most Japanese people I know do it that way, but for me I'd rather cook my eggs and eat it some other way haha. When you get really good eggs though, it's nice to kinda eat one of them raw like that with some rice.