Lucius Fontenot
Lucius Fontenot found his grandmother's avocado green Hitachi rice cooker while cleaning out her house—which inspired him to embark on a photo and oral history project documenting the appliance's impact on Acadiana's memory and culinary culture.
This article was published in partnership with Télé-Louisiane. Read more about our collaboration with the bilingual Louisiana media platform here, and find the French version of this story at telelouisiane.com.
It was the early 1970s, at noon on a Thursday or a Friday. Housewives across Acadiana were preparing lunch, little kitchen TVs turned to Channel 10—Bill Bessun’s typical greeting, “Hi, Bill Bessun here, you’re watching Meet Your Neighbor Acadiana" playing in the background. Looking up from the pot or the oven or the sink, they saw something curious on the television screen: a squat little machine, and a hand scooping rice into it. The camera then zoomed out, focusing again on Bill—who was proceeding as usual. “Hm,” they mumbled, stirring and scrubbing away. The show went on, every now and then panning back to the odd pot of rice, which had started to steam.
Finally, about halfway through the show, Bill looked at the camera and smiled. “Now, if y’all were wondering what we were doing when the show started …”—the camera zoomed back in on the machine—“what we’re doing is making perfect rice. In a Hitachi rice cooker!” At this, someone lifted the lid and reached in with a spoon, pulling out a fluffy, steaming pile of medium grain rice. “You can now get one of these for yourself at Floyd’s Record Shop over in Ville Platte.”
“And the phones never stopped ringing after that,” Floyd Soileau remembers of the most successful advertising campaign of his career. “The ladies were sold on it.”
The Hitachi Rice Cooker's Arrival in America
The mid-century Japanese invention had already risen as a symbol of women’s liberation half a world away—after a Toshiba washing machine salesman discovered that washing clothes was less trouble for Japanese women than the task of preparing three rice-based meals a day. When the salesman proposed the idea of an automatic rice cooker to an engineer, who did not know how to cook rice, the engineer’s wife Fumiko Minami set herself to the task—developing the model still at the base of the appliance almost a century later. During the first year, Toshiba sold 200,000 rice cookers a month. A manufacturer’s race ensued, in which companies across Asia rushed to create their own prototypes. One of those was Hitachi.
By 1958, Hitachi rice cookers had made their way across the Pacific to Hawaii—whose Asian-influenced cuisine also heavily incorporates rice. The trend slowly stretched its way to California—one of the earliest mainland advertisements for the appliance (promoted as being sold at a local Asian market) appearing in the Stockton Evening and Sunday Record in 1966.
“It’s interesting, the idea that the mention of this appliance throughout South Louisiana, would cause people to get really nostalgic and go into these really sentimental stories. People remember that thing very fondly . . . there’s a respect for it, sort of this weird adoration for this artifact.” —Lucius Fontenot
At the time, Americans who encountered the rare machine considered it a foreign novelty more than a revolutionary tool. Hitachi had bigger fish to fry in the American market than a rice cooker—and was devoting more time and advertising money towards their automotive, electronic, and computer products.
But somehow, in the years between 1966 and 1970, the Hitachi rice cooker made its way to Acadiana, where hundreds of miles of fields were freshly a-wave with the products of the still-emerging rice farming industry, and where the regional diet was largely made up of rice dishes like gumbo, jambalaya, étouffée, boudin, and daily plates of rice-and-gravy.
There is more than one origin story attempting to explain the Hitachi rice cooker’s arrival in Acadiana, all difficult to verify with certainty. But newspaper archives show that a Lafayette Asian market called Tomiko’s was placing advertisements for the product in the Daily Advertiser in 1970, selling it as a machine (priced at $26.50) that “Cooks perfect rice every time—automatically—and STAYS HOT AS LONG AS YOU WANT!” At the same time, regular advertisements in the Alexandria Town Talk were promoting them in the classifieds at a price of $19.95, and with a choice of colors.
It was around this time that two Evangeline Parish businessmen, totally independently, encountered the product that, in their hands, would come to revolutionize Cajun and Creole cooking.
Guillory Wholesale
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when Bruce Guillory and his wife Gladys, owners of Guillory Wholesale in Mamou, first started selling the Hitachi rice cookers. In an article published in 2000 in the Ville Platte Gazette, Gladys cites the date as the mid-1970s. Their son Paul estimated the late 1960s or early 1970s—which is likely more accurate; a Gazette article from November 1971 announces that Guillory Wholesale donated “one of those fabulous Hatachi [sic] 8-cup electric rice cookers” to the Mamou Volunteer Fire Department for their Christmas party raffle.
Regardless, according to Paul, Bruce first encountered the rice cookers at a trade show—likely in Chicago or Dallas. “As I recall, he initially purchased four rice cookers to try—one for my mom, one for his mom, one for Gladys Mayeux, and one for Hazel Deshotels (his two sisters),” he said. “All were pleased with their performance, and he then started selling them like hotcakes.”
“They couldn’t believe the amount of—‘steamers’ they called them—that we were selling. They came here to thank us for that. They had to air freight them into Louisiana. They never expected that. They didn’t know what the hell was going on.” —Floyd Soileau
Arthur Courville, who worked as a delivery man for Guillory Wholesale for fifteen years, remembers the first sale—“We retailed it for $13 a piece,” he said. “And the store made a profit.” It started slow, he recalled. But then “Before you knew something, we were delivering them by the case to the mom-and-pop stores in the country” from Crowley and Basile to Marksville. Once a week, Bruce would go to Lafayette and sell there—“he’s the one that really started pushing the rice cookers in the Lafayette area, too. He really sold a lot, and then it started expanding. I mean, it got to where we were selling … it was unreal what we were selling.”
In the 2000 Gazette article, Gladys explained that the product succeeded because the local people approved of it. The quality was still there, and it was less trouble for the cook.
Floyd’s Record Shop
Around the same time, Ville Platte record producer Floyd Soileau was working directly with Hitachi, selling their stereos, tape recorders, and televisions. (Again, the dates are difficult to verify with certainty, but the earliest Floyd’s Hitachi rice cooker newspaper ad I could find is from 1972.)
Through the grapevine, he learned that Hitachi had another product that might appeal to local cooks. “I had never heard of that before,” he said. He had one of his employees purchase one, and brought it back home to his wife, Jinver. He asked her if she would try to use it to cook the rice for the next day’s lunch.
“So, next day, I’m anxious to get home for lunch, and she’s all disappointed,” he recalled. “She says, ‘Oh, the baby’s crying. I didn’t have time to read the instructions, and I couldn’t do it.” The next day, though, when Soileau came home for lunch, “she had a smile from ear to ear.” She loved it, and described the rice as “perfect”. “That’s all I wanted to know,” said Soileau.
Back at the office, he placed an order from Hitachi for six or seven cases of the rice cookers in various colors and sizes. “We started selling,” he said. “I was trying to get my record dealers to stock it and sell it, but I knew we’d have to do something to let the people know about it.” Thus, the ad spot on Meet Your Neighbor—plus plenty more. Soileau saw the gap between the product and the market—which was basic knowledge of its capabilities—and he spent hundreds of dollars getting the word out. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the cultural place the Hitachi rice cooker holds in Acadiana today can in large part be attributed to this very advertising campaign. “Nobody had done any promotion,” he said. “The other distributors didn’t want to spend money advertising somebody else’s product. But we were getting orders in-store. We were making money off of this.”
There were other rice cookers, Soileau laughed. “But nobody wanted the Panasonic, because nobody had tried them before. The Hitachi was a proven thing, we approved it. And so, we had the market for it. It was a beautiful set up.”
“The Item to Have in a Cajun Home”
Throughout the 1970s, the Hitachi rice cooker became a coveted newfangled addition to almost every Cajun or Creole kitchen. “Before the rice cooker,” explained Soileau, “Cajun brides had to learn to cook rice in this special little pot on the stove, and you had to use it every day, and get the measurements just right, and cook it just right so you wouldn’t ruin it.” At the 2000 Festival de Musique Acadienne in Lafayette, which was dedicated to Soileau for his contributions to recording and promoting Louisiana French music, Barry Ancelet introduced him as “a young man that probably saved more Cajun marriages than anybody else we can think of”. As it had in Japan, the rice cooker condensed an hours-long process into a few minutes and a single push of a button—granting women more time to spend outside of the kitchen. “The Hitachi rice cooker was the number one gift for newlyweds, at the top of every registry,” said Soileau. “It was the item to have in a Cajun home.”
For a time, the two main distributors of the product in Louisiana were in fact Floyd’s Record Shop and Guillory Wholesale—who were each selling the things by the truckload. The often-repeated oral history claims that the sales reached such monumental heights as to make Louisiana, and Evangeline Parish specifically, the site of the single largest distribution of Hitachi rice cookers outside of Asia. Per local lore, to better understand this phenomenon, executives from Hitachi Corporation in Japan flew to Evangeline Parish to see it for themselves. “They visited Ville Platte and Mamou and all that, thanking us for selling their product,” said Soileau. “They couldn’t believe the amount of—‘steamers’ they called them—that we were selling. They came here to thank us for that. They had to air freight them into Louisiana. They never expected that. They didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Paul Guillory confirms this, recalling that the executives were actually attending a trade show in New Orleans, and had rented a car to visit Evangeline Parish to figure out why this tiny rural area had such a fierce demand for the cookers. Of course, when they drove the roads leading into Evangeline, the seemingly-infinite fields of rice would have delivered as quick an answer as any. Photographs from Paul’s family archive document the executives’ meeting with his parents, Bruce and Gladys seated with the suited Japanese men at their kitchen table right at the center of a quintessentially 70s-style kitchen, sipping coffee.
The Louisiana market purportedly had its role in the appliance’s evolution, as well. Paul and Soileau each recall that a change to the product was suggested to manufacturers that would make it less reactive to the amount of salt Louisianans tended to add to their rice. “We told them to change that,” said Soileau, “and they did.”
And then there was the matter of size. Originally the cookers came in three-cup, five-cup, and eight-cup options. “We needed a ten-cup,” said Soileau. “And then later they came up with even larger ones for restaurants.”
Eventually, the area's big box stores got wind of the product’s popularity, and Hitachi rice cookers became available everywhere. Guillory Wholesale kept a healthy stock going at the small shops across the region, but Soileau—frustrated that Hitachi was going to stop using him as a main distributor and sell directly to the department stores—quit selling them. “I spent all this money helping you get this program set up, and now you’re going to cut me out? Nah, that was it,” he said.
By that point, though, the Hitachi rice cookers had become a ubiquitous part of the landscape. People could hardly remember cooking rice any other way.
The Enduring Legacy
In 2023, Hitachi still sells rice cookers, but these robot-esque multi-setting $100+ products are rarely found in Acadiana, and hardly resemble their predecessors at all.
Still, the idea of the rice cooker as a kitchen necessity has not dwindled here. When I went off to college, I purchased my own three-cupper and packed it up with my toaster and my microwave. Rice is still a staple in Acadiana’s small towns, and this is how you cook it.
And even I, born at the end of the millennium, know exactly what a 1970s Hitachi rice cooker looks like, and I can place it on my grandmother’s counter—from which we served ourselves so many gumbos and gravies. And like most of the others, still steaming in Cajun and Creole kitchens for miles ‘round, it still works just fine.
“It’s one of those things where, as an adult, it’s like—wait how do I get one of those?” said Mamou-raised, Lafayette-based photographer and filmmaker Lucius Fontenot. “They’re always around.”
Inspired after inheriting his grandmother’s avocado green cooker and photographing it, Fontenot found himself drawn into the enduring legacy of the cooker—discovering how many people he knew still had them and had intense memories associated with them. “It’s interesting, the idea that the mention of this appliance throughout South Louisiana, would cause people to get really nostalgic and go into these really sentimental stories. People remember that thing very fondly . . . there’s a respect for it—sort of this weird adoration for this artifact.”
His ongoing Hitachi Rice Cooker project features photographs of cookers still in operation in kitchens across Acadiana, combined with interviews of their current owners—altogether forming a tapestry of Acadiana’s culinary history centered around this little Japanese invention, which is now as thoroughly Louisianan as corner store boudin, or gravy on rice.
"It was like the dinner bell—‘Come serve yourself a plate!’ —Kirstie Cornell
"My cooker has been with me for more than thirty years—it outlasted my marriage, and has fed me in a way that goes beyond bringing rice to the table. —Sarah Spell
"In the back shed, we found two Hitachi rice makers, still in the boxes. I said, ‘That’s mine!’ I think we kept the other one in the box just in case someone’s breaks or dies. The other brands of rice cookers just don’t work right. They don’t have the ‘ding!’" —Rachel DeCuir
“I mean,” laughed Fontenot, “when I was a kid, I thought Hitachi was a French word."
