[wk_end]

It's pretty much impossible to overstate how important rice is in the East Asian diet: for a comparison to the west, think something like bread, potatoes, and pasta combined.

Home chefs aren't necessarily going to want or need a top-of-the-line rice cooker, true - but considering how much rice the average Japanese home chef makes, they wouldn't necessarily not want one. $1100 at the high-end is nothing compared to the price at the high-end of virtually any other kitchen appliance; if you can afford it, why cheap out on something you're going to use almost every day, for almost every single meal?

But maybe more importantly, think about restaurants! Although the stereotypes are somewhat overstated, Japanese apartments are often too small to cook in comfortably, and people often work long hours and need quick bites at all hours of the day, so people eat out a lot. And Japanese building codes are far more liberal than western ones, so restaurants can be tiny and individual buildings in Tokyo can have twice as many restaurants as entire city blocks in the west. Net result: Tokyo has among the most restaurants per capita of any city in the world - and considering the population of Tokyo, that's a huge number of restaurants. And almost all of those restaurants are going to need at least one or two (and some a whole fleet); if you're making rice on an industrial scale, it absolutely doesn't make sense to cheap out.

Much of the above is true in many other places in East Asia too - most notably, China. That's a big market for high-end rice cookers!

[solardev]

Don't restaurants just use big rice cookers, not necessarily high end ones? Those things can make like gallons of rice at once.

[wk_end]

Depends on the scale, I guess. I've definitely seen some Zojirushis behind the counter at more than a few restaurants.