“After I die, I wish to come again as an onigiri.”
With these phrases, Yumiko Ukon, the proprietor of rice ball specialist store Onigiri Bongo in Tokyo’s Otsuka neighborhood, lowered the sheet of paper from which she was studying her speech to a captive viewers and took a bow. Just a few hours later, as Japan’s first-ever Onigiri Summit was winding down, I used to be granted a five-minute viewers with Ukon.
“You talked about in your speech that you just’d wish to be reborn as a rice ball,” I stated. “What taste?”