The first sound of the Japanese school bell that is worth our attention is not the signal for class, but for lunch. There is no cafeteria, no noisy queue with a metal tray, no sandwich eaten on the run over a cold windowsill. Instead – the classroom’s sliding door, a metal cart with steaming thermoses, children in white kyūshoku-tōban aprons, looking like a miniature brigade of cooks. Lunch was not “somewhere out there” at the end of the corridor. It came into the classroom, between notebooks and chalk, and was laid out on the same desks where fractions had just been calculated. And suddenly it turned out that the most educational lesson of the day began precisely when “classes end” in a Polish school: at the moment when the children say a choral “itadakimasu” over a bowl of brown rice and miso.
When you look at kyūshoku over the course of a year, the tray becomes a kind of edible calendar. In spring, the first strawberries appear – not yet perfect, but fragrant with the promise of summer. In summer, triangles of watermelon roll in, the seeds landing in an extra little bowl – the kids have the precision of snipers. In autumn, soft orange kaki cut into little fan shapes gaze at the class from the trays, and in winter, crunchy apples from Aomori appear almost by default. Children learn the seasons not only from drawings in a textbook, but from their plates. And they acquire habits that are good to have in adult life – eating healthily and seasonally. In this same everyday spectacle there is yet another layer – shokuiku (食育 – literally “eat” and “educate”): posters with a smiling carrot, a nutrition teacher explaining which foods “give strength to your muscles”, which “protect you from illness”, and why fish “gives you strength to think and remember”. Sometimes a farmer visits the class to give a talk about working in the fields. And sometimes classes go out to the fields to see how the cabbage grows that they will eat in a salad the following week. The children come back to school with muddy shoes and flushed faces, and then during kyūshoku they hear from the school broadcast system: “Today’s cabbage in the salad is the same cabbage you harvested last week.”
The longer I watched kyūshoku, the more clearly I saw that in Japan the school lunch is not a break from education, but its densest form. Everything is contained in one simple ritual: equality (everyone eats the same thing, including the teacher), respect for food (almost zero waste, at least when it comes to rice), care for the body (mandatory tooth-brushing after the meal), and a quiet lesson in gratitude towards the people who made this food possible in the first place. What for us is most often a technical problem – “how to organise a cafeteria” – in Japan has become a “lesson without a blackboard”, repeated day after day, from the first grade through to the end of junior high school. Today’s text will not be about “what Japanese children eat”, but about how they eat – and what we can learn from them.
A classroom. The bell rings out in the corridor behind the wall – not the metallic buzz familiar from Polish schools, but four characteristic notes, delicate like a melody from a toy piano. The sliding door to the hallway moves aside with a soft swish. But no one stands up, no one pulls sandwiches out of crinkling plastic bags.
The children sit at their desks as if the lesson were still going on. On the backs of their chairs hang colourful little pouches for toothbrushes, printed with Anpanman, Doraemon, Rilakkuma, sometimes Sumikko Gurashi or Kamen Rider. Under the desks lie randoseru – those famous, stiff backpacks – with keychains in the shape of onigiri, pandas, a miniature fluffy “umaibō”, or a bottle of Ramune attached. The air smells of chalk and wood.
Suddenly the corridor comes to life with the clatter of wheels. A metal cart rolls up to the door – like in a hospital, except that instead of sterile chill it carries the smell of curry and fried fish. The door slides open wider. A small delegation appears in the doorway: several pupils in snow-white kappōgi, with caps on their heads and masks on their faces. They look like little cooks taken straight out of a hygiene textbook – and at the same time, they are clearly children, because colourful Chiikawa socks stick out from under their smocks, there are sneakers with the “Precure” logo, Hello Kitty shoelaces.
Is this some kind of make-believe restaurant game? In my Polish memories a “school lunch” is a noisy cafeteria, a queue with a metal tray, someone pushing to the front, someone else whining over overcooked carrots. Or the second version: a sandwich eaten on the run or over a comic book (there were no smartphones yet), between one bell and the next. Here – lunch comes to the classroom. And what is more important: it comes together with a lesson.
After the bell, the classroom changes as if at some silent command. Several pupils – today’s kyūshoku-tōban (給食当番, literally “those on duty for the school lunch”) – stand up and quickly move to the back of the room. There, behind the last row of desks, the “logistics base” is already prepared: a stack of metal trays, a row of white bowls for soup, and a basket with reusable chopsticks that will go back to the school kitchen with the rest of the dishes after lunch. Someone tips a classmate’s cap to one side, someone else helps tie the strings of another’s smock. There is a lot of childish clumsiness in all of this, but also a strange, serious concentration.
The cart with the meals rumbles into the room, its wheels squeaking on the linoleum. Steam rises in lazy ribbons from the steel thermoses: in one, rice; in the second, miso soup; in the third, the main dish – maybe today it will be karaage, crispy pieces of chicken, or saba shioyaki, grilled mackerel. On the side is a crate with small bottles of milk, each with a blue cap and the logo of the local dairy.
The pupils on duty set a big thermos with a large silver ladle on the teacher’s desk. Everything has its order: first the trays are laid out, then the bowls, then the chopsticks, and only at the very end does the “pouring ceremony” begin. The children line up along the aisle between the desks. There is no pushing at all, although little jokes do happen.
At this moment, the slightly hoarse school broadcasting system crackles to life from the loudspeakers on the wall. First a little melody – a fragment from “Tonari no Totoro”. Then the voice of a pupil from an upper grade:
“Today in kyūshoku we have: rice, miso-shiru with daikon and tofu, teriyaki chicken, cabbage and corn salad, and an apple from Aomori prefecture. The carrots came to us from the neighbouring town, and the rice was harvested in the fields of the valley…”
The children only half listen, but they do listen. The teacher nods, adds one sentence, sometimes two, explaining that “today we are eating this because it is harvest season,” or that “this soup contains a vegetable that many of you don’t like, but it is very important for your health because…”. No one turns on a multimedia presentation. One minute, a few sentences – that is enough to connect what is on the plate with what is outside the window, in the soil, with the farmers.
When everyone has returned to their desks with full trays, there is a brief moment of extraordinary silence. Not the forced silence of an exam, but the kind you get before a performance starts. The children look at one another, someone adjusts their chopsticks, someone giggles because a slice of carrot fell on a friend’s desk. The teacher sits down as one of them – not at a separate table somewhere off to the side, but at an ordinary desk, with the same tray, the same milk, the same portion of rice.
“Right then… itadakimasu,” the teacher says.
The class replies in chorus:
“Itadakimasu!”
The word hangs in the air for a moment. In Poland we say “smacznego” – “enjoy your meal”. In Japan there is a similar custom, but the meaning is a little different. “Itadakimasu” is not a wish but an acknowledgement: “I humbly receive what has been prepared.” In that one word, the farmers, the cooks in the school kitchen, the trucks that brought the milk, the rain that fell on the rice are all contained. The children pronounce it automatically, but the fact that before the meal the broadcast system and the teacher spoke about the hard work that had to go into this meal means that they are building within themselves a very simple, bodily memory of gratitude.
Then the eating begins. The rustle of paper sleeves being torn open from around the chopsticks, a quiet “ah!” from someone who has just discovered that today it really is their favourite cucumber salad after all, someone in the back trying to pass their apple to a classmate because the other child has an allergy and cannot eat a particular side dish. No one pulls anything of their own, something special, something better, out of their backpack. That would look very strange. Everyone feels this.
When the last mouthful disappears from the bowls (or at least the last grain of rice), the teacher says:
– “Gochisōsama deshita.” (御馳走様でした, literally “[I appreciate] the great effort [that went into preparing this meal]”)
Again, a choral response. This time it is not “I receive”, but “thank you for the feast”. And again – not so much for the taste itself as for the journey the food has taken before it ended up on the tray.
The pupils on duty spring back into action. Someone collects the empty bowls, someone else counts the empty milk bottles. It looks a bit like a well-organised orchestra that practises the same piece every day. This whole process – from the cart in the corridor to the final “gochisōsama” – is far more orderly and full of meaning than many a formal lesson.
What strikes me most is that everything happens in the same classroom. At the same desks where, just a moment earlier, the children were solving equations with fractions, writing kanji, reading a passage from a textbook about Heian-kyō. There is no “there we learn, here we eat”. There is no spatial separation: classroom – cafeteria – corridor. School life is one continuous line, in which eating is just as important an element as the blackboard. I know that several objections can be raised against this. I do not know what is best, but personally it seems to me that the positives of being able to use the meal every day as a lesson in gratitude far outweigh the negatives of eating in the same space in which we work. I may be wrong; I am not sure.
In Poland, I remember rather the chaos of the break: running down the corridor, gulping a nervous mouthful of tea from a mug, a sandwich eaten almost on the run, a bit like refuelling a car – just quickly, just to fill the tank. Here, the same moment has the rhythm of a breath: inhale (preparation), pause (the shared “itadakimasu”), exhale (the meal itself), and at the end a gentle closing of the ritual.
The teacher who eats with the children is, in all of this, a key figure – even though in theory he or she is doing the same thing as they are. The teacher does not give a lecture on healthy eating, does not check who has eaten how much, does not loudly comment on who has left how much on their plate (well, unless they have left their rice – that may draw a remark). They are simply present. Sometimes they laugh at some comment, sometimes they tell a short anecdote about how they themselves once could not stand natto and now eat it without complaining. For many children, this is the loosest moment of the day, the only time when they can ask the teacher what they liked in primary school, whether they have a favourite flavour of Pocky, whether they prefer melon-pan or an-pan.
And at the same time, the hierarchy does not disappear. The pupils understand that this is still “sensei”, even if they are holding the same bottle of milk as they are and grimacing slightly at the soup with gobo (burdock root). The difference lies in the fact that the authority does not stand off to the side, but sits with them, sharing the same experience – the same soup, the same rice, the same time.
Sitting in this classroom, looking at the row of bowls, listening to the quiet conversations about who has juku after school today, who has baseball practice, you may think that what is most important in a Japanese school is happening right here. Not at the blackboard, not during the history test, but between the bells, over a simple plate of rice and miso.
From today’s perspective, kyūshoku seems like something absolutely obvious – as if Japanese children had always eaten the same hot lunch at school. But the beginnings were much more modest and very far removed from today’s steel carts and colour-printed menus.
It is 1889. Tsuruoka, a small town in what is now Yamagata Prefecture, still scented with the turning of eras – partly old, already partly modern. On the grounds of a temple, a school for children from poorer families is being established. At the desks sit pupils who often have nothing to eat with them. Not because they have forgotten it at home – there is nothing at home.
One of the monks, Sato Reizan, begins to concern himself with this in a very concrete way. He sees children who are unable to concentrate on their lessons because they have had nothing to eat since morning. He sees the difference between those who bring barley in a box from home and those who look at their lunch with a mixture of shame and hunger. And he decides to do something about it: he rolls up his sleeves and goes from house to house, asking people for millet, barley, vegetables, whatever they can spare.
From these offerings, the first “school lunch” is created: simple onigiri, a piece of grilled fish, a little tsukemono – pickled vegetables. No elaborate dishes, no curries, no colourful desserts. But for those children it is the difference between hunger and the possibility of normal learning. And – equally importantly – between feeling like “the inferior one” and simply being one of the pupils.
In this first, modest kyūshoku there is already everything that Japan will go on to develop over the following decades: the concern that children should not be studying on an empty stomach, the conviction that the school has a duty to care not only for the “head” but also for the body, and a deeply intuitive sense of equality. At lunchtime, no one should appear visibly poorer.
Later, when I was living in Japan and heard stories about Tsuruoka, I pictured a scene completely different from today’s cafeterias: the cool temple verandas, pupils in worn-out clothes and a simple bowl of barley that suddenly becomes a symbol that school is for everyone.
Against this background, the twentieth century was a brutal test for the whole idea of school lunches. In the years of mounting militarism and then war, kyūshoku simply could not be maintained – there was a shortage of everything: rice, vegetables, fuel for cooking. Children once again began to go to school hungry, and many stopped going at all.
After 1945, Japan was a country devastated physically, psychologically and morally. With bombs and ruins there always comes something less spectacular but just as painful: malnutrition. Children grew too slowly, were anaemic, fell ill. In reports from those years the same words recur over and over: “shortage” and “hunger”.
(Yes, I am aware that over the previous five decades the Japanese army committed numerous and unforgivable crimes against the populations of many countries, such as Korea and Southeast Asia. But a simple “serves them right, they had it coming” somehow still does not sit right when we think about those hungry children at school.)
It was precisely then that the authorities – with the support of foreign food supplies – returned to the idea of kyūshoku, but now not as the local initiative of a monk from Tsuruoka, but as a nationwide programme. Schools began to receive powdered milk, flour, oils – things which, from today’s perspective, sound like rather unappealing foodstuffs, but after the years of war were a miracle. For many children, the first glass of milk at school was in fact the first glass of milk in their lives.
In 1954, the School Lunch Act was passed, which enshrined this system at the national level. From that moment on, kyūshoku ceased to be an “option” and became one of the pillars of public education. The goal was no longer just “so that children don’t go hungry,” but also “so that they eat something sensible.” The menu gradually changed: alongside rice, soups, and grilled fish, meat, bread, salads, and dishes inspired by Western cuisine began to appear.
When we look at today’s list of ingredients in a school kitchen – fresh vegetables from local farms, fish from a nearby port, sometimes tofu from a small family-run workshop – it is hard to imagine that half a century earlier the foundation of this system had been parcels from abroad and bowls of thick, powdered soup. And yet the logic was the same: a child has the right to eat something every day that strengthens them, and the school has a duty to provide this in such a way that children do not feel inequality at the table.
Today, all primary schools in Japan and almost all junior high schools are covered by the kyūshoku programme. It is not a “nice bonus” – it is something without which a Japanese school is unthinkable.
With time, however, the Japanese took a step further. The “lunch” itself was no longer enough. A country that had achieved spectacular economic growth began to struggle with a different problem: excess. Processed food, sweets, soft drinks, a Western lifestyle. A new question arose: how can we ensure that children eat not only “a lot” or “tasty”, but wisely?
The answer was shokuiku – literally “education through food”. In 2005, the Basic Law of Shokuiku (食育 – literally “to eat and to educate”) was passed – a law that took food out of the kitchen and placed it directly into the curriculum. Suddenly it turned out that a plate could be just as important a “textbook” as a maths book.
A new figure appeared in schools: the teacher-nutritionist, officially eiyō kyōyu. This is someone between a dietitian and an educator. This person draws up the monthly menu, counts calories and micronutrients, but at the same time gives short lessons on where rice comes from, why it is worth eating vegetables in different colours, and why we should not throw food away. Japanese children have regular nutrition lessons. Tell me, is that not a brilliant idea? Why do we still not have it in our schools?
Children encounter the word shokuiku almost as early as kyūshoku. I saw posters in schools with cheerful mascots in the shape of a carrot or a grain of rice, with slogans like: “A colourful plate – a strong body,” “Thank the earth when you eat.” In classrooms, charts hang on the walls dividing foods into those that “give strength to your muscles,” “protect you from illness,” and “provide energy to your brain.” This is not “adult nutrition science,” but a language that an eight-year-old can understand.
June in Japan is “Shokuiku Month.” In practice, this means that schools organise poster competitions about food, communal cooking of simple dishes, and meetings with local farmers. Sometimes classes go out to the fields to see how the cabbage grows that they will eat in a salad the following week. The children come back to school in muddy shoes, with flushed faces, and then during kyūshoku they hear over the school broadcast system: “Today’s cabbage in the salad is the same cabbage you harvested last week.”
When I watched Japanese pupils in a classroom listening to a brief announcement about which prefecture the apples for that day’s dessert had come from, I thought that this was shokuiku in its best form. No moralising, no BMI charts. Just calm, everyday reminders: “Food has a history. You are part of it.”
And it is from this weave – poverty in a temple in Tsuruoka, post-war hunger, the 1954 law, and the philosophy of shokuiku – that today’s lunch was born, carried around the classroom by little kyūshoku-tōban in white smocks. It is no longer just a meal. It is a small lesson in history, geography, nutrition, biology, and above all – in being part of a community.
At first glance, kyūshoku is simply a very concrete set: a bowl of rice (more often brown than white) or a slice of soft shoku-pan, a main dish – grilled fish, golden karaage, sometimes steaming curry – plus miso-shiru or a thicker tonjiru with pork and vegetables, a small cabbage-and-corn salad, a bottle of milk, and from time to time a dessert – a piece of apple, a yoghurt, jelly in a transparent cup.
In the class I had the chance to observe as a visitor, the day when the new menu was posted was a small holiday. Children ran up to the sheet of paper pinned to the blackboard with a magnet, traced the coming days with their fingers, and burst out in excited shouts at the magic words: “kare raisu” (curry day), “supagetthi” (spaghetti day), or “koppe-pan to anko”, a long roll filled with sweet red bean paste. I myself quickly learned that the week is divided not into Monday and Tuesday but into “curry day” and “the day when it will be curry again.”
When you look at kyūshoku over the course of a year, the tray becomes a kind of edible calendar. This is very important, because it teaches children behaviours they will repeat in adulthood – seasonality in food. In spring, the first strawberries appear on the plates, not yet perfectly sweet, but fragrant with the promise of summer. In summer, wedges of watermelon arrive, with seeds that children spit out into a separate bowl with sniper-like precision. In autumn, kaki appear in the classroom – soft, orange, cut into fan shapes – and in winter apples are almost obligatory, often from Aomori. Added to this are festive “treats”: pastel hishi mochi for Hinamatsuri, dishes with oni motifs and roasted beans for Setsubun, and in December a small box of “Christmas cake” – the Japanese version of a Christmas dessert, which disappears from the trays faster than the rice. Children learn the seasons not only from illustrations in a textbook but from what they are crunching on at that very moment.
There is also the local layer – the taste of one’s own prefecture. In Hokkaidō, ikura – glistening salmon roe on rice – may appear in kyūshoku; in Ehime, children eat mikan mandarins so often that a legendary “mandarin rice” has even emerged, cooked in mikan juice; in Aomori, apples appear in every possible guise: fresh, stewed in syrup, even in sweet buns. Sometimes a farmer (or someone working in food processing) comes into the classroom to talk about the rice that happens to be in their bowls that day. Another time, the children go out to the fields to pick cabbage, and a week later they smile as they search in the soup for “their” pieces. The path “from field to bowl” ceases to be an abstraction – it has the face of a man in a baseball cap and a specific patch of soil where, just a week earlier, the children had been running in rubber boots.
And it is precisely here that the true subject of this “lesson without a blackboard” reveals itself. On the tray there is rice, fish, soup, and an apple, but underneath there is something else: the awareness that food is not born in the konbini or in a magical kitchen with unlimited supplies. Behind every meal there is someone’s work, land, weather, the season, political decisions, and the everyday life of farmers. The child does not hear: “eat your vegetables, they’re healthy,” but instead receives, time and again, a quiet signal: “someone worked hard so that you could eat them.” There is no coercion, but a gentle upbringing that does its work and over time brings results far better than direct attempts to push children into “eating healthily.” And although in practice it ends with the class rejoicing over “curry day”, beneath that, layer by layer, something far more important than a menu is being built – a basic, embodied gratitude and also healthy food preferences.
The most moving thing about kyūshoku is that no one lectures the children from a podium saying, “you must not waste food.” Instead, they feel it, because this is how the education around food is organised. After lunch, the pupils on duty peek into the large metal containers and see – sometimes quite literally – how much is left. In many schools, the leftovers are counted: how many portions came back untouched, how much rice remained at the bottom. In statistics this later appears as just a few grams of waste per child, but in the classroom it is not a number – it is a specific little bowl that someone did not finish. In the Japanese word mottainai (“what a pity, what a waste”) there is a bit of shame, but more a kind of empathy towards the world. When you see that your classmates have eaten everything, it is easier to ask yourself, “why did I leave mine?” than to shrug it off. And it is not shame in the sense of “the teacher is yelling”, but rather a slight prick inside that over time teaches responsibility.
Kyūshoku is also a rare luxury these days: eating without screens. In the classroom I observed, no one took out a phone, no one turned to the wall with NicoNico or YouTube in their hand (because there simply are no phones). There is no television either, no cartoon playing “for lunchtime”. There is the school broadcast system, conversation, sometimes silence punctuated only by the clatter of chopsticks. The teacher reminds them to chew thoroughly, to at least try a small piece of something they “don’t like”. And yes, here I must honestly admit: there were things I myself had to force down – for example natto, those stringy fermented soy beans, or certain versions of gobo, burdock root. But even then I felt that giving them a try was part of the game. It is not about everyone falling in love with every vegetable, but about giving it a chance instead of rejecting it out of hand.
After kyūshoku, the day does not simply dissolve. Right after the trays are put away, a small ritual of caring for the body begins, something I would probably see in Poland only in a toothpaste commercial. At the bottom of the blackboard hang rows of cups, each with a child’s name, and in them toothbrushes – some plain, others in pastel colours, with Anpanman or Sumikko Gurashi on the handle. After lunch the children line up at the sinks, pour a little water from the small taps, and for three minutes the world is reduced to the simplest possible activity: brushing their teeth. There is splashing and laughter, someone spills some water, someone else blows too hard into their cup, but the whole scene has an extraordinary coherence: food – hygiene – body – responsibility. You’ve eaten? Now take care of yourself.
Behind all of this, one more layer is at work – shokuiku, education through food. In Poland, “nutrition education” is often associated with a poster of the food pyramid and a warning about sugar. In Japan we see teacher-nutritionists who explain to children that some foods “give you strength”, others “build your body”, and yet others “protect you from illness”. Without scaring them with fat, without an obsession with calories, without the cult of the “ideal figure”. Rice is energy for running around the playground, fish is fuel for the brain, vegetables are a shield that helps you not to fall ill in winter. Simple, concrete, understandable for a ten-year-old, and – importantly – not saturated with fear.
Looking at all this from a Western perspective, I have the impression that we very often teach children that food is a problem: “don’t eat that, you’ll put on weight”, “be careful, that’s unhealthy”, “this is a cheat day, and this is a normal day”. In a Japanese classroom, during kyūshoku, food is rather a relationship: with the earth, with the body, with other people. It is neither an enemy nor a reward, but something one can be grateful for – and something worth taking care of.
When I think about Japanese school today, what comes back to me most often is not the image of a blackboard covered in kanji, not the school uniforms, not even the morning “ohayō gozaimasu”, but precisely this moment: the sound of the cart in the corridor, the white smocks of the kyūshoku-tōban, the shared “itadakimasu”, the row of toothbrushes under the blackboard, and the quiet “gochisōsama deshita” at the end. In one simple lunch there was room for education in gratitude, community, care for the body, and respect for the world. And all of this took place precisely where, at first glance, “nothing important is happening” – between the bells.
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未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
未開 ソビエライ
An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)
"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)
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