Bento and the Ideology Beyond It
I am going to talk about bento,
Japanese lunchbox. Originally I planned to choose ikebana, namely Japanese
flower arrangement as my topic. I would like to thank Prof. Mizenko for
recommending this new topic to me. I finally realized that I am more into food
than flower arrangement. In fact, this topic reminds me of my childhood school
days when we had similar things. If I could have box lunches like this, I swear
I would have been more willing to go to school every day. I would like to
explore what bento is and the ideology behind bento.
Bento is the Japanese word for a meal
served in a box. The ingredients of the food can vary. The containers can be
different, too. It is quite common in Japan. Bento is an important part of
Japanese food culture and everyday life. People eat bento at schools which
don’t provide lunch to students. The custom of bringing lunch from home is also
quite prevalent among company employees. Japanese people also eat bento when
enjoying hanami in spring, that is, cherry blossom viewing. Before I did this project,
I got most of my impression about Bento from Japanese anime and TV shows. I did
not know that there are so many types of bento, including Makunouchi, Ekiben,
Koraku, Kyaraben, etc. Bento served in restaurants are called Makunouchi bento,
which are quite elaborate and are arranged in elegant lacquered boxes. This
kind of bento are usually presented at formal meals and people are supposed to
eat it at table. Its other name “Between Acts Bento” suggests its origin,
because it was historically eaten in-between kabuki or other shows in a theatre
in the Edo period (1603-1868)[1]. In the past, they usually
came with equally exquisite lids. The best way is to first gaze at the lid for
a while before open it to enjoy its beauty inside. When you open the lid, it is
like a carnival. You don’t know where to look, because there are so many
colors. The lunchbox is subdivided into four smaller squares, while
symbolically denote rice planting fields (Ekuan 3). People would also relate
rice to harvest, relate fish to sea, and green leaves to mountains. I tried
this type of bento once here in the United States and I liked it. The only
problem was that the portion was too big for me to consume it up. But I do not
think that it would be problem back in the past, because kabuki shows are said
to be very slow and long, typically lasting about four hours. You really need a
large portion.
Another bento is called Ekiben, or the
“Train Station Bento,” which are boxed meals sold at train stations for
travelers. Nowadays they are also available onboard the trains, in department
stores near major stations, or convenience stores. Koraku, or the “Picnic Bento,”
is made to be eaten outside in occasions like picnic, excursion or cherry
blossom viewing. Because it is meant to be shared among many people, the koraku
bento usually has big boxes. Kyaraben, or the “Character Bento”, is probably
the most famous among all these types. Kyaraben usually contains food that is
made into the shape of anime characters, trees, flowers, animals and so on so
forth. Normally this kind of bento are made for young children, but nowadays
adults are big fans too. Bento are not always that fancy. With more and more Japanese
women working outside, they do not have enough time to prepare exquisite bento,
especially when you get them mad. They will give you a Shikaeshi Bento, the
“Revenge Bento”.
Bento is a reflection of both
relationships and personality. As a form of communication, it can “reveal the
state of the maker/consumer relationship, or the state of the individual, in
the case of bentō made for oneself” (Occhi 65). Parents make nutritious bento to show their
love to their children. Students have bento mates whom they often eat bento with.
It can be a symbol of friendship. Bento as a surprise gift can sometimes help
to start a romance. I found a life manga series that entirely deal with the
topic of bento. Its title is Takasugi-san chi no Obento (The Takasugi Family’s
Bento), by Yanahara Nozomi. It’s not like those cookbooks that teach you how to
make bento, but it depicts stories in which bento has become a unique warm
thing that get people closer. It is through bento making and bento sharing that
the characters overcome their difficulties, reach understanding and become a
true family. There are also many other manga series that take bento as their
topic, and these manga indicates that personality can be revealed through bento.
For example, Nichinichi bentō (Daily Bento), “relies heavily on this trope as a
means for exploring the characters’ differences” (Occhi 65).
For Anne Allison,
however, bentos are used by the highly centralized Japanese educational system
as a way to training young children to accept ideas of what it meant to be
Japanese. Therefore, I would like to
explore the relationships around bento and the meaning of bento for different
age groups and genders through analyzing blogs of three popular Japanese bento
bloggers (who are a female homemaker at her 40s, a male system engineer at his
30s, and another female homemaker at her 20s, respectively). A little bit
historical perspective is also adopted in this analysis, to give a panoramic
view of the bento world. By sorting the differences and similarities between
the three bloggers of different ages, I have also found that they themselves
present the aesthetic preferences of each generation respectively, but at the
same time, they are still “manipulated by the state ideological indoctrination”,
just as Anne Allison stated in her article “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The
Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus” in 1991.
I plan to look at bento preparation
time and food content & arrangement in the light of gender and age.
From the perspective of the time spent
in preparing bento, it is clear that Japanese women put more efforts and time than
men do. According to a survey conducted by the website nippon.com, the engineer
man spends about 30 minutes each time, 3 days a week on average in making
bento, whileママちゃん, the mom in her 20s, makes bento
30 minutes each time, but 5 days a week, and Rumi, the female homemaker in her
40s, spends 40 minutes each day, 5 days a week in making bento. It takes so
much time for experienced bento experts like these bloggers to make bento, and
I cannot imagine how long it takes for ordinary people to make it. According to
a report on NPR news in July 2016, the moms who are taking a local bento class block
out as much as 90 minutes every morning to make kyaraben for their children. In
fact, a 2007 Japan Today article said
that 70 percent of Japanese women quit working after having a baby. So women are
still the main force of preparing lunches.
From the perspective of food content
& arrangement, it is apparent that Japanese women are inclined to make more
kawaii bento than men. The engineer man makes bento for himself, so it’s
obvious that he hasn’t got married and that the function of bento weighs more
than its appearance. However, he would try to make his bentos as good-looking
as possible to attract blog followers.
So it is fair to say that we eat bento
with our eyes, as appearance is still an important element in Japanese food.ママちゃんhas two sons and
one daughter who are all under 10 year’s old, so most of her bentos are
kyarabento—bright colors, animal shapes, anime characters, anything with faces,
etc.
The level of cuteness in Rumi’s bentos is between the engineer man andママちゃん. She sometimes
make elegant bentos without any significant anime features like animal or
people’s faces, but she does add some little cute plastic decorations around
the food (sometimes outside the lunch boxes), instead of making food into
shapes that resemble some cartoon characters, especially when she is making
bentos for her high school daughters. Even when she is making bentos for her
husband, the semi-kawaii feature appears.
It looks like little children’s
lunches are always made in the form of colorful kyarabentos, which were used to
trick picky children to eat nutritious food that they did’t like. But now it
looks like it’s a norm. Also, high school girls may still be into cute things,
just as Rumi’s bentos for her daughter indicate. Young people’s taste is
always the trend. So this can suggest the trend towards increased cuteness in
bento in Japanese society.
But their bento also have something in
common. For example, they are all rich of colors, colors in strong contrast like
red against green, pink against light green, brown against buff, yellow against
purple. The shapes are various, too—round, oval, square little flag, waves of
corrugated paper. The types of food are also various. They tend to be small, separated
but compacted, reminding me of the compactness of many things in Japan, like
small apartment rooms, and crowded trains in rush hour.
In Rumi’s bento image posted in Oct
2011, the sweet potato balls are made into the shape of chestnuts with the
burr, to indicate that it is an autumn food. The egg and tofu look like autumn
leaves. Namafu, which is a wheat gluten, has been colored and shaped like maple
leaves.
Similarly, ママちゃんposted a bento picture on Oct. 17th,
2011. It’s for her 3-year-old son. In this bento, a rice ball is made into the
shape of an apple, with a face, because apples come into season in the fall. We
can also grapes, because it is a fall food, too.
The two moms’ efforts of using fresh in-season
ingredients in bentos to show their appreciation of nature. They not only make
all kinds of food in shapes of things we find in nature, but also add some real
things from nature. For example, in this bento made by Rumi, a small real
branch is put on top of food, which is put in a bento box made of bamboo.
All
these embody what Allison calls the “naturalization” code of bento style. “The
emphasis is on presentation of the natural rather than the nature itself”
(Allison 157). The combination of using real things from nature like tree
leaves and reconstructing food materials into nature has allowed bento to be
culturally and ideologically manipulated. She described bento as an
‘ideological state apparatus’ to train mothers into socially-recognized ideal
mother and train young children who go to nursery schools into good citizens.
Nursery schools are supervised by the Ministry of Education, and it is a place
for little children to socialize and learn rules and rituals in real world for
the first time. Children often take bento to nursery school. The more elaborate
and exquisite the bento is, the good mother she is considered. On the other
hand, bento much be eaten up in nursery schools. If you eat very slowly, the
entire class would have to wait for you before they can move on to the next
activity. Therefore, according to Allison, bento is a tool used by the Ministry
of Education to “socialize children and mothers into the gendered roles and
subjectivities they are expected to assume in a political order desired and
directed by the states” (Allison 158). In other words, by making and consuming
bento, mothers and children are trained to be good citizens that the community
expects them to be.
Bloggers enjoy sharing food recipes and
show their cooking skills, which becomes part of the pressure and state
ideological indoctrination from the media side. Therefore, Allison suggests that
the only way out is to redesign bento, in a gender neutral way, for example.
Although the codes of making bento
mentioned by Allison in 1991 still exist now, things have changed somehow. They have realized the phenomenon. If a mother makes lame bentos, her child may be
laughed at in school. Bento time is a like a competition. Making bentos
consumes a lot of time. Many people are now trying to resume the real
naturalness of food in bento. The engineer man seems to be one of them. Itoh
Makiko is also a popular blogger who advocates healthy and simple bento, though
her standard about the appearance of bento is to make it look appetizing, not
she doesn’t want to spend longer than 20 or 30 minutes to make a bento.
In my opinion, redesigning bento may
work, but it is far from enough. We have to encourage critical thinking in the
educational system, to teach young children to form the habit of thinking for
themselves.
[1] Do
You Know Your 4 (+1) Bento Types? Updated October 19, 2015 | Food & Drink ,
Bento. https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/277/
References:
Allison, Anne. “Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The
Lunch-Box as Ideological State Apparatus”. Food and Culture—A Reader. New York,
2013. 154-169.
Do You Know Your 4 (+1) Bento Types? Updated October 19, 2015 | Food & Drink ,
Bento https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/277/
Ekuan, Kenji. The Aesthetics of the Japanese
Lunchbox By Kenji Ekuan, edited by David B Stewart. MIT Press, 1998.
Occhi,
Debra J. "Kyaraben (character bento): The cutesification of Japanese food
in and beyond the lunchbox." East
Asian Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, p. 63+. Academic OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=AONE&sw=w&u=coll33478&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464354374&it=r&asid=bf98724afc97ab37e453cc80977f0a04.
Accessed 28 Apr. 2017.
Rumi’s Bento Blog
http://hotlunchtime.blog95.fc2.com/page-1.html
The engineer guy’s Bento Blog http://bokuben.jugem.jp/
ママちゃん’s Bento
Blog http://ameblo.jp/tajw8259/
No comments:
Post a Comment