Rice Cleansing

Here is a new experience for me, cleaning rice. Now I don't mean when you stick a bunch of rice in a pot and swirl it around a bunch of time until the water you pour off it is clear (and no longer white). This is more like a de-shelling process.

Right now is in towards the end of the rice harvesting season in Japan. Their rice patties have turned a golden color (or as one of my students pointed out, the color of my hair - and yes for a shocking second I thought he was saying I had rice-colored/white hair) and are being cut down.
Once you have all those delicious grains of rice all harvested however, you can't just pop those things into your rice cooker...you must de-shell them first. Harvested rice has a golden tint to it and once de-shelled, it loses that tint and becomes the white little grains we know and love.
In order to de-shell the rice, you must either have the proper equipment  or find yourself at one of the odd little stations located in crazy unsuspecting places not near anything else all around the inaka (out-there, the boonies, no-where-ville, the grasslands, farmland, you know). Why the inaka? Because where else are you going to farm rice? You cannot farm it in the city, and as such it makes sense to have these machines located in proximity to the rice patties. Though of course anyone who sells rice would probably own the equipment for themselves. But for those of us who do not have that fortune, there are the machines.
Basically you dump your golden, shelled rice into the indicated area which is then filtered through and you can witness the powder of the shells coming off and the freshly de-shelled white rice pouring out into your container. Here you can see us doing just that, and as you might be able to figure out, it costs 100 yen for 10 kilos of rice (22 pounds people)  and if you have more, you just insert another coin.