Recent global warming and climate change has presented greater challenge to the global agriculture of having to cope with more severe adversaries from various abiotic stress conditions including drought, cold, and heat. As a preliminary step towards developing a heat-tolerant japonica rice variety through molecular breeding, we examined and compared expression of several genes that have been reported being expressed specifically during rice panicle development in different rice varieties after subjecting them heat stress. Although the induction of these transcripts upon heat treatment was invariably observed in all rice varieties tested, the magnitude and kinetics of the induction were found to be different among these varieties, suggesting possible functional implication of these genes in conferring heat tolerant phenotype during reproductive organ development of these plants. General protein synthesis activity as well as pollen viability incurred by the heat stress treatment were also monitored in these plants and the result showed a close correlation overall with the induction dynamic of these transcripts under heat stress. Therefore, these genes, together with the ones involved in the regulatory network for the expression of them, could serve as candidates for useful markers with which molecular breeding of heat tolerant japonica rice can be facilitated.