'Rice baby' - a humanistic invention of the Japanese suddenly became famous again thanks to Covid-19

As is customary around the world, when a new Japanese baby is born, relatives and neighbors will visit and congratulate the whole family. However, in the past 2 years, this precious custom has not been able to be carried out due to regulations on disease prevention and social distancing.

The image of a baby is printed on the outside of the rice bag.

However, "in the midst of difficulty , the pandemic is one person's worry but another person's opportunity." A man who owns a rice shop in Kitakyushu (near Fukuoka), has come up with an "ingenious" way to make money from tiny grains: stuffing rice into small bags printed with babies. 

Rice babies are sent to relatives so they can cuddle them as if they were holding their own babies.

And "rice baby" is the name that the Japanese give to such rice bags. They are rice sacks printed with the baby's picture and weigh exactly the same as the child they "replace" . The "rice babies" are sent by the parents of the "real babies" to their loved ones so that they can hug them like they are holding a newborn baby.

Mr. Naruo Ono, the owner of the Kome no Zoto Yoshimiya rice shop, invented the "rice babies" 14 years ago when his son was born. At that time, a few close relatives of his family were far away and could not visit the baby as usual. This made Naruo Ono think: Is there anything I can do to solve this problem?

He came up with the idea of ​​​​making rice bags of the same shape and weight as his son, pasting photos on them and sending them to distant relatives so they could "see" and "carry" the child. .

One day, someone saw Naruo's "rice baby" on a store shelf and commented that this was interesting. At that moment, Naruo realized that his pretty bags of rice could be sold in the market. Since then, he started making baby-shaped rice bags for customers all over Japan. Later, some merchants also copied his invention.

Each bag of rice is carefully weighed to match the weight of the child.

The bags of rice are carefully weighed to match the weight of the child. Some companies charge one yen per gram, and a 3.5kg pack costs 3,500 yen or 32 USD.

In fact, Dakigokochi ("rice babies") has been around in Japan since the early 2000s, but the Covid-19 pandemic has made it famous again.