I should probably point out at the onset that this may very well be completely uninteresting to everyone. However, since I can imagine someone finding it amusing, or even actually fascinating (I suppose that person could be out there), and, primarily, because I think it will be fun for me I'm going to barrel right ahead.
Starting next week I'm going to be posting pictures of my school lunch each day along with a description of the food and a basic review of how good it was. Anyone not living in Japan might find this interesting as an example of, not just Japanese food, but exactly what school lunch is like here. And for those of you in Japan, well, maybe you can just compare my school lunch to yours and gloat about how much better off you are. Unless you're Jeff. His school lunch sucks.
So, that's all going to be starting on Monday, but I figured it would be a good idea to spend a little time today talking about the basics of how school lunch works here.
First of all, I'd say the biggest difference between school lunch in Japan and in the States is that, here, everyone eats it. Every single student in the school eats the lunch whether they want to or not. No one brings anything from home. They're not allowed to. I suppose this could be considered one of the advantages of a uni-cultural country: everyone likes the same food. There are no vegetarians or people with religious dietary restrictions. I suppose there might be some of that in Tokyo or other very large cities, but for the most part it just doesn't exist. Because of this, we JETs are also expected to eat the school lunch. If the students were to see us eating whatever they want, they would feel it was unfair and that they, too, should be able to eat what they want. If you came on the JET Program as a vegetarian or Muslim or Jew, well, suck it up. You can either learn to eat it, learn to be hungry, or start keeping snacks in your desk. Since I can eat just about anything you put in front of me, I don't mind. But for others, this insistence on conformity can be a little more difficult to swallow.
Now, this isn't 100%. My girlfriend, for example, simply told her school that she wouldn't be getting school lunch any more. She didn't like it at all and was hardly eating anything each day, leaving her extremely hungry for the last few hours of work. They accepted this (begrudgingly) at her junior high school, but she still has to eat the school lunch at Elementary school, which, of course, led to a lot of red tape concerning how to charge her for eating at one school and not another. (I found that amusing since the same office charges me separately for my junior high and elementary lunches and has been doing so for quite some time.) She has also been pretty well shunned from eating with the other teachers, but I don't think she really minded that too much.
That's probably the second big difference about lunch here: the absence of a lunch room. The students eat at their desks in their homeroom with their homeroom teacher, and the teachers either eat at their desk or they gather in the meeting room (or somewhere similar). In my school, we all gather in the meeting room. Everyone trickles in as they can, but we all wait for every person to finish before we get up and clean everything up.
Of course, not only is there no lunch room, there's no cafeteria. At least, not at my school. Some have them, and some don't. But not having a cafeteria is pretty common here. Our lunches are delivered everyday from the Kurihara City School Lunch Center. They drop everything off in the morning and pick it up in the afternoon. This is the cleanup we have to do. We have to get everything packed back into the giant metal containers so the trucks can take it away and fill it with more lunch the next day.
Other than that, school lunch is school lunch. It varies a bit from place to place, but you probably get the basic idea. It costs me 290 yen per day, which at the moment is about $2.40 US. I pay this at the end of the month and it usually comes out to somewhere around 5000 yen ($42) I think.
And that's my kyuushoku in a nut shell. For a more in-depth analysis of the sometimes awesome, usually bland, occasionally terrible food I have to eat Monday through Friday whether I like it or not, tune in next week.
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2 comments:
That's interesting. When I was in high school in Osaka, we had a real lunch room and cafeteria. There were a lot of choices on the menu, and you could even buy snacks between classes if you wanted (I used to run up the stairs to my homeroom while scarfing down kara-age). I remember they had ramen and curry rice, and free hot tea... you just paid a la carte. A lot of people brought bento.
Anyway, I guess it might be different for compulsory education which gets more of a subsidy. I'm surprised they require people to eat the school lunch though...
I'm pretty sure it is just because I'm a part of compulsory education. The senior high school JETs I've spoken to have a cafeteria like you describe and are free to bring in anything they want. Since I also teach at Elementary school, I know that they are the same as Junior High. They actually get the exact same lunch, although the portions are slightly smaller. At Kindergarten, however, all the kids bring a bento made by mom. Pretty cute actually.
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