Nearly every meal in Japan includes rice. Rice is mostly served in a bowl apart from the other dishes with no flavouring or salt added. Cooked rice is called 'Gohan'.
Rice is also used as a flower to make for instance mochi (rice cake). It's also the main ingredient of sake, the Japanese rice alcohol.
The Japanese rice is a special short-grain type and very sticky. The Japanese State aims to be self-sufficient in rice production and controls the market by subsidizing the local growers and taxing heavily the foreign rice.