🍚 Are you cooking rice today? If you use a rice cooker you have Yoshitada and Fumiko Minami to thank for that.

When Yoshitada’s water-heating business started losing sales in the early 1950s, he was tasked by Toshiba with inventing an automatic rice cooker.

But Yoshitada didn’t know where to begin when it came to cooking rice, so he turned to his wife for help and before long it became a family job.

“We children couldn’t just start by watching her doing it any longer, so we started helping her,” says the couple’s youngest son, Aiji Minami.

Aiji recalls being tasked with checking thermometers and timings while his mother jotted down all the details in the children’s school notebooks.

“Looking at the notebook, we find the result of a measurement recorded at 2am or 3am. It shows that my mother was testing it all by herself, even after putting her children to bed.”

But it took years to get things right and the family had to eat the failed rice batches — that’s until Yoshitada made a breakthrough.

“My father brought a complete rice cooker home in the middle of the night and forced everybody to wake up and he said, “We are going to eat this together.” We cooked rice with the rice cooker and said, “Ah, this is delicious.”

While today it might come across a simple kitchen gadget, at the time it caused a domestic revolution, liberating women from being tied to the stove for hours a day.

It was also an instant hit and according to to Aiji sold tens of thousands in the first few months.

“Housewives sent a large number of thank you letters, some of them were passed to my mother… she started to cry when she read them. I think she felt she had accomplished something great in her life.”

🎧 Hear more on Witness History: https://bbc.in/4jQMcon