We named our rice cookers ⟨炊きたて⟩ (takitate, or freshly made) because of our wish for the users to be able to eat hot rice whenever they want. Not only in outdoor activities, but also in a situation where neither electricity nor gas is available, I want anyone to have access to hot and delicious rice.

In this 100th milestone year after the Great Kanto Earthquake, we started developing “Tiger Kamado” based on our wish to create new dining standards with ideas that bring warmth and comfort for the coming 100 years.

What are features of the product and what did you value in developing it?

The feature of this product is that it allows you to cook rice with just a copy of newspaper. You can cook delicious rice at any time by inserting pages from a newspaper alternately into two openings at the bottom of the oven and setting fire to them. Neither electricity nor gas is needed.

It was easy for us to develop a product to cook rice quiet well with some ideas and our experience in outdoor activities. But we wanted to develop a product that is helpful even in emergency situations without compromising the tastiness of the rice cooked with the product because it would be sold under the Tiger brand.

What led to the development of the product?

In Customer Service where I was assigned then, an increasing number of parts whose availability periods had passed were disposed of. I wondered if it would be possible not to dispose of the inner pots of the rice cookers but to use them somehow.

I remembered that, when I was an undergraduate student and worked part-time at a youth retreat, I cooked rice over a fire made with newspaper. I came up with the idea of using the inner pots that were to be disposed of to cook rice with newspaper because all the inner pots of rice cookers had a water level scale for cooking white rice irrespective of the model, which would allow anyone to easily measure the amount of water required in the same way as in the rice cooker they usually used. Then, I recalled the Shining System in our company.

The Shining System is an in-house idea-collection system that encourages internal courageous challenges and initiatives in line with the corporate philosophy, aiming to promote employees’ autonomy through such activities and develop an organizational culture that makes it easy to create innovation. Although I had applied several times to the Shining System in the past, my themes were not adopted. On this occasion, the theme I proposed, which was sustainable and socially contributable, unexpectedly passed the initial screening and thus I decided to have a try at the development.

Could you tell us about any interesting episode during development of the product? How did the people around you react?

As the first step, I cooked rice in the inner pot of a rice cooker on a BBQ stove in the yard of my house. I was not sure if enough heat to cook rice could be obtained by using a newspaper as the fuel source and so I used two metal inner covers in layers to increase the heat-insulating properties. Then, I had an image of a kamado (clay oven) to transmit the combustion energy obtained by burning a newspaper to the inner pot more efficiently and looked for something commercially available that I could use by modifying it.

For example, I went to do-it-yourself stores and 100-yen shops, looking for round metal fittings that could fit in a flower pot, and then made a number of prototypes and repeated experiments with them. As a result, I found that a metal laundry basket was the best in size; therefore, I bought them up at a store, which might have surprised the store staff. I believe my family must have wondered what was going on since I repeated prototyping all by myself.

In the middle of development, I encountered troubles such as failure to obtain enough heat because the newspaper did not burn completely. However, I found that providing two openings, one on the left and another on the right on the front of the product, and putting sheets of newspaper into the openings on the right and left one by one alternately enabled the sheets to burn completely without them overlapping each other. Once stable combustion was achieved by putting sheets of a newspaper one by one into the openings, we could successfully optimize heating according to the timing of putting the sheets into the product, as with a programmed rice cooker.

As people long ago expressed nicely, it is exactly right when cooking rice to start with low heat and then rapidly increase to high heat in the middle of the cooking process.

I received a suggestion about collaborating with a disaster prevention event from the Girl Scouts troop that my daughter joined, and so I demonstrated the developed product to many families. People there seemed to doubt whether rice could really be cooked using newspaper. So, I still can’t get forget the cheers that broke out when I opened the cover after cooking. It is not often that many people break into a loud cheer when you cook rice, is it?

Lastly, could you explain again about your passion for developing this product?

I conducted surveys and learned a lot about disaster prevention through this initiative. In the course of conducting the surveys, I saw some people who had experienced disasters and they said that meals were their only pleasure when they were living in the disaster area.

The company started with the founder’s wish to drink hot tea like that freshly brewed by his mother at any time, and so he manufactured vacuum bottles that survived the Great Kanto Earthquake. It is now 100 years since then and I feel it is our mission to deliver a product that makes hot and delicious rice available to anyone at any time. I hope that more and more people will know our passion for developing a useful product through this Tiger Kamado rice cooker that can be used to enjoy outdoor activities and that can be used to serve delicious rice reliably and safely with a newspaper in emergency situations.