Rice and Strangers

March 10, 2021

I love to eat. I like French, Italian, Chinese, and ethnic cuisines, but I especially love Japanese food. In the French city where I once studied abroad, which was a regional town, it was difficult to find Japanese ingredients, so I managed with what I could buy in a small Chinatown. I tried various types of rice, but some were mixed with large quantities of small dead insects, so finding delicious and safe rice became a significant issue for me. One day, I tried buying something called "Camargue rice" at a local supermarket. It was a bit more expensive than other rice, but it was slightly sticky like Japanese rice and delicious. Above all, it was easily available at any supermarket. My rice problem was solved.

Several years later, after returning to Japan, I began researching Vietnamese laborers who were brought to France during World War II. Vietnam had been under French colonial rule since the late 19th century. Just before the outbreak of the war, about 20,000 Vietnamese people were mobilized to work in the munitions industry, but France was quickly defeated by Germany, and since the war ended, they soon became unnecessary. However, the French government could not simply abandon them and tried to find ways to utilize them while keeping them under control. Many of them were interned mainly in the south and forced to engage in various types of labor. One of these was rice cultivation.

Most of them were originally farmers, and rice cultivation was (thought to be) their specialty. Thus, some Vietnamese people were made to grow rice in the wetlands of Camargue in the south. Rice cultivation had been practiced in this region for a long time, but it had completely declined due to the influx of cheap rice from colonial Vietnam. Thanks to them, rice cultivation in this area was revived, and even today, as France's largest rice-growing region, it continues to produce the delicious rice that saved me, a "rice refugee."

What an irony of history that the rice cultivation, which had declined due to imports from Vietnam, was revived by laborers who came from that very same Vietnam. In the beautiful Camargue, where flamingos stand and fly about, were they reflecting on their mission to revive the paddy fields in this land? Or was it about their families far away, or perhaps the future of their homeland?