Japan's School Lunches

About this book

At noon in a Japanese elementary school, nobody queues at a canteen counter. Children in white caps serve their own classmates — rice or bread, a main dish, soup, and always milk — from a menu planned a month ahead by a licensed nutrition teacher, cooked that morning in a kitchen that keeps a frozen sample of every dish, and governed by a 1954 law that defines lunch itself as education.

Japan's School Lunches is the complete guide to that system in 200 entries: the law and the money; the skim-milk years and the return of rice; curry rice, fried agepan and the remembered whale meat; the dawn world of the great kyushoku centres and the cooks who lift their kettles; the lunchroom's duty squads, greetings and rock-paper-scissors seconds; and a journey through every region's tray — Hokkaido's soup curry, Okinawa's taco rice, Kanazawa's jibu-ni, Nagasaki's champon — to the museums, old schoolhouses and restaurants where a visitor can taste it all.

Every entry closes with a Meeting It note directing you to the official source for current menus, fees and visiting details — because this book describes the system, and the system is best confirmed locally. Written and produced in Japan by Aki Wakamatsu.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.