| Hey, this is Vlad in Tokyo. I've spent the better part of the past two weeks studying up on what I'm going to call the iPad of the kitchen, an ingenious gadget hyper-optimized to satisfy its target customer: the rice cooker. This humble household appliance is largely overlooked as a piece of technology, despite its historic significance and mechanical brilliance. But in recent years, technological innovations have made the unglamorous rice cooker just as deserving of praise as the fancier fare of Silicon Valley gizmos. Notably, the rice cooker's history begins with Japan's mightiest tech companies. An electric rice cooker was one of Sony's first-ever inventions in the 1940s, though it was never introduced. A decade later, Fumiko Minami, the wife of engineer Yoshitada Minami, tirelessly tested his countless prototypes to help develop the first commercially available automated electric rice cooker, which was released by Toshiba in 1955. In the modern version, many of the principles of the originals remain the same, though the decades have honed the appliance into a nearly fool-proof way of cooking rice. Like the iPad, first impressions of a rice cooker can be underwhelming. No, it can't also cook lasagna or toast almonds. But modern rice cooker varieties are capable of breadmaking, cake baking and even poaching eggs—which makes them more skilled than myself. The highest purpose of the appliance, though, is simply making rice. Match the cups of rice to the assigned water level in the cooker and it'll deliver exactly the same result every time, which you can specify to a, ahem, granular degree of detail. My own deep-dive on rice cookers was was the inevitable consequence of moving to Japan. Live here long enough and you eventually succumb to the country's delicious and sticky rice and want to make it at home. I pored over the specs of thousands of models on offer from Zojirushi, Tiger, Mitsubishi, Sharp and more. The geek in me was delighted by Toshiba's vacuum system, which draws the air out of the rice grain, forcing the water to penetrate deeper in for a fluffier finish. Meanwhile, Panasonic touted diamond-coated, multi-layered, extra-thick cooking pots. Living in Japan, I have access to a higher tier of rice cookers. Here, the voltages are different, as are the ways companies differentiate each model. The computerized "Fuzzy Logic" capabilities on Zojirushi cookers are celebrated in other countries, but they're mere table stakes across all manufacturers in Japan. The most basic cookers have a microcomputer constantly detecting cooking temperature and auto-adjusting on the fly. The truly high-end ones come with pressure cooking, platinum-coated pots and promises of mind-blowingly fluffy rice, that the marketing copy universally describes as "plump." Ultimately, I settled on a reasonably priced Zojirushi model with an unreasonably cute jingle. It cooks flawless rice in a uniform fashion and brings me serious joy. The only question that lingers for me now is why don't rice cookers get the techie attention they deserve? And with adoption still lagging in some countries, more to the point: Why would anyone claim to make gourmet rice without one? —Vlad Savov | 
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