An American Lunchbox in Japan

Japanese children think that Americans eat hamburgers on picnics.

Since half of my AET job description is “cultural ambassador,” I saw it as my duty as an American to set the record straight.

Today was Bento Day. A bento is a kind of Japanese lunchbox. There are little shops all over the place that specialize in bento. You can order a plate with any number of different lunch items—usually rice and at least one or two, but often a lot more, little dishes—that will be packaged into a neat little (usually) plastic box with (usually) a little rubber band holding the lid on. You are free, then, to bring this box with you on a picnic, a hike, or to your office lunch. Or even, once a month, to school.

In public elementary and junior high school, all students and teachers, with almost no exceptions, are required to eat the school lunch. School lunch isn’t bad. And, by Japanese standards, it’s pretty cheap (the standard price is ¥5000 [roughly 50 USD by the current exchange rate] per month but I don’t drink milk so I get away with paying only ¥4400).

But one day out of the month, everyone gets to bring a bento. Teachers can get away with picking one up from 7/11 or bringing (as one of my English teachers did this month) just a big plate of salad from home. But, if you’re a student in junior high school, your bento had better follow an unwritten, yet very strict, set of guidelines.

First of all, you need a cute little bag or a cloth to wrap everything up in. Inside this bag, your mother stacks a set of nifty matching containers that hold your lunch. One of these containers is almost certainly filled with white rice. Fried rice is also acceptable and maybe you can get away with fried noodles; I’m still a bit hazy on where this line gets drawn. The second container is a hodgepodge of tiny paper or foil cups containing what appears to be two spoonfuls each of leftovers from the last six nights. One cup perhaps contains a piece of breaded pork, one a meatball, one a salad, one a few bites of spaghetti. If you’re lucky you might get some fried chicken, but you’ll probably just have to settle for a piece of broiled fish and an array of different pickled vegetables. Also, make sure you don’t forget the fork and spoon and the pair of chopsticks that match the set of containers your lunch came in. Because then you’ll be forced to use a set of waribashi (wooden disposable chopsticks) that your homeroom teacher keeps handy in his desk. And that would just throw off the whole experience.

I don’t have a cute little set of containers for my lunch, but I do have some nice Tupperware that work just fine. So, on Bento Day, I usually fill one large Tupperware with leftover spaghetti, pack some carrot sticks or a piece of fruit, toss in a little bottle of Yakult, and I’m good to go. Sometimes I bring a sandwich, but that’s about as crazy as things get.

The students are always really interested to see what I’ve brought in my bento, and equally amazed to hear that I actually made it myself (“What? You mean your mother didn’t make it for you?”). Today, I took it upon myself to explain to the group I was sitting with that American students almost always have sandwiches in their bento boxes. They nodded, considering this carefully and acknowledging that it indeed made sense. Then one girl asked me, “What about hamburgers?”

I shook my head. “No. Never.” All seven students sitting within earshot responded the same: by widening their eyes and saying, in unison, “Ehhhh?”

“Rice?” said another girl.

“Not usually,” I told her. They all looked confounded.

This incident wouldn’t have impressed me so much had it been the first time that I’ve encountered this misconception about Americans having hamburgers in their lunchboxes. Another student wrote something to that effect in his notebook just a few weeks ago. It was in response to an in-class assignment to generate a sentence that employed the new grammar point they were learning. His grammar was fine, so I didn’t think the timing was appropriate for me to question the content. But today it was time for me to take a stand.

Someone has been feeding these children lies. American school children do not get BigMacs in their lunchboxes. People don’t barbecue their lunch and then take it with them on a hike. Well, maybe some people do, but they’re not normal. They’re deviants. They don’t represent the American norm, which is good old-fashioned PB&J: white bread, grape jelly, and Skippy.* Nothing more, nothing less.

*Okay, I admit, I no longer eat white bread if I have a choice, grape jelly is lame, and I’ve long since come to favor natural over hydrogenated peanut butter; but that’s beside the point. We’re talking about America here people, and I’m not going to let my own sissy preferences tarnish the national icon that is the classic peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Again, I direct you to the disclaimer in this blog’s first entry.