If It’s Pickled Salad, It Must be Thursday

The bell tones at 12:45 p.m. The lunch cart is already waiting outside the classroom. Some students dismantle rows of desks to form clusters while others slip on white robes and plastic gloves and begin dishing out today’s special. I, too, queue for miso. In the absence of a cafeteria, students feed themselves in the same room where they take every class.

As a guest teacher, I choose my dining companions. Most often it’s a rambunctious 6th grade section because of their propensity to blabber with a mouth full of partially chewed bananas and stab one another with chopsticks.

Subsidized school lunches rock! $2.81 buys a well-balanced meal. For example, Monday’s feast featured bland miso soup, tuna potatoes, bread sandwich with microscopic layer of jelly, mini-milk, and last but not least, cinnamon sticky bun.

Like everything else in Japan, eating is regimented. Lunch isn’t a bowl of cherries; it’s a trial in speed eating. Thirty minutes are devoted to this disruption from learning. But by the time students have served one another (officially noted when a designated child stands and delivers the all clear, or maybe it’s grace), no more than 12 minutes remain. Eating to beat the clock, I shovel rice into my mouth with tweezers – I mean, chopsticks. Urgency is audible as classical music crackles over the PA system.

Finishing in time isn’t the only challenge. Refuse must then be sorted. The Japanese are experts ensuring every scrap has its place. Unfinished morsels get deposited back into their original serving containers (perhaps to be recycled for next week’s discounted lunch). Plates, bowls, and utensils are stacked. Milk cartons must be drained, deflated, and folded as detailed in step-by-step pictographs hanging in each classroom. Even the plastic straw wrapper gets recycled.

The 1:15 p.m. bell signals students to stow trays, realign desks, and wheel the organized cart back into the hall. Breakdown is complete, but digestion is not. Fifth period begins as scheduled.