Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Lunch at school. The infamous kyushoku.

As a JET it is your privilege, nay, DUTY to gleefully chomp down on whatever the kyushoku sentaaaa decides to heave together and declare as ‘food’, then smile sheepishly at the thought of a 4000-yen chunk being siphoned from your monthly paycheck because of it.

School kyushoku varies massively in quality on a day-to-day basis, transforming through varying degrees of disgustingness in a wild and erratic fashion. The kyushoku ethic follows the suki/kirai nuance of Japanese culture. The children are not supposed to like all of the kyushoku - there are going to be things they like, and things they don’t like, but they are expected to eat everything. An average Kyushoku can be broken down into 4 main parts, explained herein:

Main Dish The main dish is always cold, no matter what temperature it is meant to be served at in the real world. It is usually a single piece of fish / meat, and usually resembles something that my kindergarten kids make out of dirt. One of the oddest main dishes I had was a big ball of those little tiny fish all mashed together, which tasted not unlike hay. But hay with eyes.

Salad School salad seems to use a dressing that is made entirely from water and salt. No matter what vegetables have been used, the resulting salad just tastes weakly of jockstrap and for that reason, is one of the most consistently tolerable items on the kyushoku menu.

Soup Soup is safe. The soup is always hot or lukewarm, which makes it more like actual food. Soups are given meaningless names, which give us no clue as to the origin of the soup, but invariably all kyushoku soup is based on miso and the other ingredients are just whatever is left over from yesterdays salad. ‘Special’ ingredients are sometimes thrown in - possibly by accident - such as quail eggs (or some other bird with small eggs. Crows?), giant bits of mochi (Ive never really got over the ‘mochi can be savoury too!’ thing) and gristle.

Rice Rice is usually also safe, unless they try to get clever. Sometimes other things are mixed in with the rice, for example to make “tako meshi”, which is white rice with the appealing existence of bright purple bits of octopus scattered throughout.

Once a month, the kids are allowed to vote what they would like to eat for one day, but the poor bastards have been so brainwashed by routine that they end up voting for things that we either get frequently or have no strong feelings for whatsoever. And no matter how much I shout “Write pheasant!! Write curry!! Write sirloin steak!! If everyone asks for sirloin steak they HAVE to give it to us, right? RIGHT??”, they will always end up writing something like “a fish” or ” a banana”.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2003 at 10:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.