The bag of rice: Exactly. Exactly. What good is your wall now, O Crab? And BoJ is full of things like that.

For the current storyline, we treat it as what it it presents itself as: it is a book of stories that the Rokugani tell about the Shadowlands. Some of it may be factual (as stories may be factual) and some of it is sheer imagination. Which is which is left to the GMs discretion. ;-)