In Japanese, there are two words for rice: gohan ( 御飯 ) and kome ( 米 ). While the latter is strictly used for actual rice (usually uncooked), the word gohan means cooked rice, but is also the general word for a meal. Rice is considered the base of a traditional Japanese meal, and when one says asagohan ( 朝御飯 ) or yuuhan ( 夕飯 ), meaning breakfast and dinner, one is literally saying the -morning rice- or the -evening rice-.
This can sometimes lead to confusion at first, and it took me a while to figure out if my wife Mizuki was talking about the meal as a whole, or simply the rice part of it. Clearly, the role that rice plays in a typical Japanese meal can be a bit difficult for us to fully grasp. It reflects a different way of thinking about meals, and can lead to many miscommunications.
