So who am I and why should you listen to anything I say (or write)? What makes me an authority on school food in Japan? Well... not much, really. I currently work in Hokkaido, Japan, as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) on the JET Program teaching English to students in 6 different schools. I am entering my 3rd year as an ALT, and over these past few years I have gotten to see, experience, and eat my way through many new and unique things that I never would have encountered back home in the US. I moved to Japan only 2 months after I graduated college, and while I had attended a university a few hours away from home, living here in Japan is the first time I've really, truly had to fend for myself (though the people here have always been eager to help me adjust to living in a foreign land). For the first time I had a wave of various bills to pay and keep track of, an impossibly complex trash system to adjust to, a first car to take care of (which has given me nothing but repair bills and heartburn)... and, last but not least, a whole new kind of grocery store to figure out in order to keep myself fed.
This new food culture became an obsession of mine, and to this day I still love slowly meandering through the grocery stores (I swear I find something new every single time I do this). One of the luckiest parts of my placement in the JET Program was my school level assignment; I teach at 5 elementary schools and one junior high school. What this means is that every day I go to school, I get to eat kyuushoku, or school lunch, with the kids (high school students bring their own obentou, or lunch box). This has been an invaluable insight into the Japanese food culture that I otherwise would not have gotten to experience.
I am by no means an expert on any of the information presented here, so feel free to ask me questions about anything in my posts or correct me if I'm wrong about something. I'm pleased with how much my Japanese has improved from living in this country for so long, but I will forever be a student of this challenging language, and information about the food I'm eating (and consequently my understanding of said information) is still always getting lost in translation. Still, I hope to present you with an interesting and accurate look into the food culture of Japan through my posts. Let's enjoying school lunch! (Sorry - bad Engrish had to make it's way in here at least once. I promise not to do that very much.)
So let me take a moment to explain how this blog will work. My step father is a chef instructor at a culinary university in the states, and over the course of my stay in Japan I have typed up a sort of "Kyuushoku Report" for him and his students (and any other interested parties) to look through. What started as a simple, fun way to kill extra time at my desk soon ballooned into a 40-page beast, and I'm still adding onto it any time an interesting school lunch comes my way. This blog will contain photos and descriptions of various school lunches I have had the pleasure of devouring... and perhaps sometimes I will even deviate from this formula to blather on about some other food or oddity that has piqued my interest (and trust me, there are plenty of them).
So, to start things off, allow me to present to you the first page of the kyuushoku report my family and friends have been pressuring me to put on the internet. (And after this wall of text, I'll bring on the food - I promise!)
Kyuushoku (給食 – literally “supplied meal”) are the lunches served at elementary and junior high schools in Japan (high school students generally have to bring their own boxed lunches, though I hear some food items can be purchased at the schools). Everyone eats the same meal on a given day, and meals are always eaten in the classroom (even in junior high students are in their homeroom class for the entire day, as the teachers and not the students rotate between class periods). Each class is divided into groups (han) that are designated with a certain responsibility for the week. One of these duties is kyuushoku touban – basically “being on school lunch duty.” The students in this group must go to a designated place in the school to retrieve their class’s food trolley, bring it back to their classroom, and then serve lunch to all the students in the class (often while wearing aprons and bandanas tied around their heads – very cute on the little elementary kids). No one may start eating, however, until everyone has been served and the students in charge lead everyone in a unanimous “itadakimasu” (a set phrase you say before eating a meal).
Kyuushoku is prepared either at a designated kyuushoku center (a separate building where the food is prepared and then delivered to the schools) or in some cases it’s prepared right at the school itself (the two schools in my town prepare their own lunches, and I personally think they taste better than the ones that come out of the neighboring city’s kyuushoku center). Kyuushoku comes in three varieties: bread days, rice days, and noodle days. These are usually set to specific days of the week, though how often something is served varies between schools. At my junior high school (where all of these pictures were taken – elementary lunches are often a lot smaller in portion) we have three rice days per week, one bread day, and one noodle day. Interestingly enough, I read an article somewhere that said it was the kyuushoku system, implemented with assistance from the American government after WWII, which raised the first generation of bread and pasta-loving Japanese people. According to the article, the popularity of Western wheat products in this country now owes itself to the fact that America supplied Japan with bread (cheap and easy to pass out to many students) during the early days of kyuushoku. In fact, there are campaigns out now to get the Japanese public to eat more rice because it's popularity has diminished in comparison to bread and pasta products. Rice pasta and rice-flour breads are also becoming popular for this reason.
Anyway, for your reading pleasure, I took pictures of and wrote about some of our lunches at my junior high school. I’m usually not at this school on the bread and noodle days, so (not surprisingly) the lunches that follow will mostly be lunches served on the aforementioned rice days. I think my coworkers all think I’m a little crazy for snapping photos of the food before running off to join the kids for lunch, but hey, this stuff is interesting. A lot of the things I’ve been served at school are dishes pretty much every Japanese person knows and has probably eaten at home, but aren’t exactly things you’d encounter otherwise. Kind of like how in America we all know of and have eaten a PB&J for lunch before, but you probably wouldn’t run into that kind of stuff if you were a foreigner eating at restaurants or cooking for yourself at home.
