Is a rice cooker a daily necessity?

Do you cook rice everyday?
My husband and I are Japanese, so there is nothing strange about cooking rice every day. But we also like bread, soba noodles, pasta, udon, yakisoba and so on, so it is not necessary to cook rice every day.

I usually cook rice using this pot and wooden measure cup.

One day when I was talking with locals at our neighbor cafe, the topic of how often we cook rice came up. One of local Japanese told us that she was having trouble because her rice cooker broke suddenly because she used it every day. Rice cooker are very common appliances in Japan. I think it is unusual for a Japanese house to not have an electric automatic rice cooker, we don’t have it, though.
Many Japanese home appliance manufacturers are competing to develop and sell high-performance rice cookers. If you have a chance to come to Japan, please take a look at the electronics stores. There are so many different types of rice cookers on sale at the dedicated sales section that it’s hard to choose one.

I like brown rice with black rice.

She who used a rice cooker every day said that she bought a new one in a hurry to replace the broken one. Most Japanese people probably can’t imagine life without a rice cooker. On famous Japanese recipe web sites, you can find many ways to cook things other than rice in a rice cooker, like steamed cake and boiled vegetables.

The great thing about rice cookers is not only that they can cook rice tasty, but also that they can keep cooked rice warm. So If you have leftover rice that you cooked for lunch, you can keep it warm in the rice cooker and enjoy the same taste as freshly cooked rice for dinner. There is also a timer function that automatically cooks rice according to the cooking time. So you can enjoy freshly cooked rice for morning if you set rice and water with timer in it before you sleep at night.

VERMICULAR is made in Japan. This enamel pot is useful. I use it every day, for from stewed vegetables to steamed rice.

I know well how good rice cookers are, but I have stopped using them.
There are two reason for that. One is that I wanted to reduce my belongings. When I removed the rice cooker from the kitchen, I felt refreshed. The rice cooker is not too big, but I realized that it difinitely took up space in the kitchen. Second is that I wanted to keep the same situation when I moved to another country or another situation about cooking. I thought that if I depended on the rice cooker every day completely, I might feel stressed when living in another country or place.
So now that I can cook rice in a regular pot, I feel that I have definitely reduced stress in the future.

Brown rice with black rice. Only 40 minutes required for cooking.