The Lunchbox as a Love Letter

Bento in Emiko Davies' wonderful book Gohan - a well-thumbed cookbook of mine

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I look forward to a Shinkansen journeys between Japanese cities mostly for the excuse to choose a bento - the carefully-compartmented, prettily-presented, freshly-made Japanese equivalent of a packed lunch for travel, school or work. Bento shopping feels just as much part of the journey as buying the ticket and finding the platform. 

I hadn't given them much other thought until a Japanese friend casually mentioned over lunch that her colleague, a working mother of 4 school-aged children, wakes at 5am every morning specifically to prepare her kids' bento lunches. I was floored. 5am? Is she mad? 

Both the cultural attitude to bento, and the considered, enticingly-presented contents of a Japanese bento is a world away from my own packed lunch experience of the 90s - a couple of limp sandwiches, a banana and a pack of bacon frazzles thrown into a Forever Friends plastic box. 

I couldn't stop thinking about this over the next few days. After I'd picked up my jaw from the floor, my astonishment turned to curiosity. Of my husband and I, I'm the primary care-giver who has actively and intentionally moulded my schedule around having time to cook from scratch as much as possible. Yet I was merrily turning a blind eye to my daughter's daily intake of half a plain jacket potato at primary school. I was forced to admit to myself that no matter how much I cared about the food she consumed, I was personally unwilling to lose sleep for the cause. 

Walk into any Japanese primary school at lunchtime and you'll see why a 5am start might be needed. Onigiri shaped like pandas. Tamagoyaki cut into flowers. Sausages sliced into octopuses, cherry tomatoes nestled against edamame, each element placed with the kind of attention people reserve for things that actually matter. Which, to the mother who made it when it was still dark outside, it does. 

The phenomenon has a name — kyaraben — and a competitive ecosystem to match. There are books, Instagram accounts, annual contests. Mothers are assessed, formally and informally, on execution. A poorly assembled box isn't just an aesthetic failure: in the tight social ecosystem of a Japanese school gate, it reads as neglect. Japan's working mother population has grown steadily over the past two decades. Government policy has pushed women back into the workforce; dual-income households are at a record high. The hours have not got shorter. The bento has not got simpler.

Pre-packaged options exist and yet the handmade box persists, and the standard has risen in parallel with the number of women now doing two jobs before most people have had breakfast. There's also something about legibility. Japanese working mothers navigate a workplace culture that remains, across many sectors, structurally resistant to their presence — long hours, limited flexibility, persistent assumptions about where their priorities should sit. The bento is a domain where skill and creativity is visible and effort has a clear output. 

The bento is a daily, physical demonstration that someone thought about you specifically: what you like, what you'll actually eat, what will make you happy at midday when your mother is somewhere else. 

So, from the start of the next term I've signed my daughter up for packed lunches. I'm going to prioritise freshness and nourishment over inventiveness - I can't and won't compete with the Japanese. Dare I say it, I'm even looking forward to the challenge. As with everything in life it's about balance: even a sandwich and a pack of bacon frazzles will have to do some days and that's ok.