In Japan, school lunches are only provided for elementary schools (grade 1-6) and junior high schools (grades 7-9).
The meals on trays are usually rice or bread, a vegetable dish, some sort of meat and soup.
The bentos are from days where the kids go home early because of school events such as graduation and the teachers stay behind and have a celebratory meal.
Here are a few lunches I’ve taken pictures of:
When he’s not busy teaching English at Japanese middle school, you can find Khanh or “Kyon” at www.gaki-no-tsukai.com
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Thanks for this submission! It brought back a lot of memories of the days when I was lucky enough to eat kyushoku at a Japanese elementary school. In my opinion, here’s a breakdown of what’s cool about kyushoku:
*Most of the meal is prepared on site from scratch in the school’s kitchen by the lovely kyushoku ladies. It was nutritious and delicious!!!!
*On days when kyushoku included natto, kids used to “junken” (rock,paper, scissors) for mine because they all knew i didn’t like it…that and the big chunk of boiled squid that was served about once a month….
*There’s this thing called “kyushoku touban” which is assigned to a group of about five kids in each classroom every week. If it’s your turn to be “kyushoku touban”, you put on a white chef’s jacket and hat and basically serve the kyushoku to your fellow classmates in your classroom (there’s no cafeteria in elementary school). The “kyushoku touban” is in charge of cleaning up and taking the empty dishes back to the kitchen. It’s such a cool concept–I think it would be great to implement it in American schools.
*It’s awesome to watch a whole classroom of kids sitting at their desks with a tray full of food put their hands together and say in unison, “Itadakimasu!” before they start to eat
*I used to get a kick out of the kids watching me try the different kyushoku food. They would assume I wouldn’t eat things like fish and then get really excited when they realized I liked it.
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