School lunch

School lunch is always a mystery. The teachers have a list that shows what lunch will be each day but it’s in Japanese and I can’t read Japanese yet. A little before noon the lunches are delivered to each grade. The junior high school has three floors, so the lunches are brought up by a small elevator. The lunches are always different and much healthier than the school lunches that I remember eating when I was in middle school , like pizza, French fries, chicken sandwiches and chicken tenders. The food usually comes in two containers; a bright red and a dark red. The bright red container is almost always white rice and sometimes rice mixed with shrimp, mushrooms or pork. The dark red container is always something different. Meat balls, fried pork cutlet, korroke (fried mashed potatoes), a mixture of Japanese vegetables (roots, Japanese potatoes, bamboo, carrot, etc). Fish is frequently served. Vegetable or meat or fish soup is sometimes served. Curry with rice is served once or twice a month. Fried squid, fried octopus balls, crab rice and tuna spaghetti have also been served. For dessert there is normally some sort of jelly or custard. And to drink, there's milk. Always milk. No mystery there.

Lunch time! On the right, milk and a custard dessert. In the dark red box: fish, root vegetables and steamed cabbage. In my chopsticks is a small steamed bun filled with meat. And in the other red box, of course, white rice.

During my first couple weeks at the school I was still pretty hungry after eating lunch because the portion sizes are about half of what I was used to eating for lunch back in the states. I eat lunch with the third grade English teacher, Yashiro Hideki. In Japan, the students are all assigned to one room, or homeroom. The teachers have one large room used as the teacher’s room and move from room to room each class period to teach but are assigned to one classroom during “homeroom” period. So I eat lunch with Yashiro in his homeroom class. This actually works out great because there’s almost always extra lunch available during lunch period in his class. I think some classes just have more absent students than others and some classes just typically eat more than other classes. I’ve developed a close relationship with Yashiro because he’s one of the few people at the school and in Tonosho who can speak English rather well. 

This day's lunch had bread instead of rice, a meatball, broccoli with carrots, chicken, an apple slice and vegetable soup.

When I first started eating in the classroom I would eat at a student desk with the other students. Many students would stare at me while I ate, make comments about my usage of chopsticks and giggle if I did or said something strange. Now I eat with Yashiro at his desk in the front of the class and we talk about various topics during the 20-30 minutes of lunch time. He’s especially been helpful in letting me know what the lunch is each day if I’m unsure. Recently, I told Yashiro that school lunch is always a mystery because I never know what it’s going to be and even when I get it I’m sometimes unsure of what I’m eating. He responded, “That’s good. I envy you. A little mystery in our lives is a good thing.”

Rice (with mushrooms, carrots, crab and pork), yellow-tail fish and vegetable soup.