Alright, I presume everybody’s interest in hige-man’s bento work has begun to ripen at this point. Let’s review his profile once again, to get the rice-ball rolling.

Stats:

Name: Keisuke Umeda
Age: 31
Occupation: Designer at a game company
Passion: Bento Art
Distinguishing Facial Feature: Majestic Mustache
Web page: Umeda no site

Q: Tell us about your bento art career.

I modestly began making bento about 2 years ago. I didn’t even realize that that my passion for bento art had been gradually escalating over that period of time.

In the summer in 2013, my bento art was selected to be shown on an NHK TV program called サラメシ (sarameshi). I held my bento art exhibition in the fall of that same year. I also published a book with a collection of my bento pieces that came out shortly before my exhibition.

I’m planning another exhibition this year, too.

Q: How long have you made bento art?

About 2 years. I make a bento box every day, except when I’m too busy, when I oversleep, or when I don’t have any ingredients for it.

Q: Why did you start making bento boxes?

I got sick of eating cafeteria food. I also wanted to brush up on my cooking skills. Moreover, after the Tohoku earthquake, I started taking food safety more seriously and gave more consideration to what I put in my body. Managing my food in this way is good for my health and helped me save money, too.

Q: Why did you start designing bento?

I’m not really good at cooking and don’t have much time either. On the other hand, I wanted to enjoy lunch time. I contemplated how to do it and I soon realized that I could be creative. I realized designing bento is a great way to enjoy it. I have some bento friends at work and it became something for us to talk about, as well. The more we enjoy our lunch time, the tastier the bento becomes – to me.

Q: What do you usually do after making it?

Naturally, I eat everything. Every grain of rice disappears. I’ve never had leftovers. If I made bento boxes like the ones I do and didn’t eat them, it would mean I’m just playing with food in a creative way. I’d rather treasure and respect the food and I show that respect by eating it.

This is MY LUNCH and if I don’t eat it, it means I don’t eat lunch.

There is a saying in Japan, “If you don’t finish your meal, your eyes will be crushed.”

Q: What kind of bento boxes do you make?

Pictures!

「クチビルべんとう」(Lips-bento)

「ヒゲべんとう」(Hige-bento)

「桃べんとう」(Peach-bento)

「サンマたちの横顔べんとう」(saury fish’ side faces bento)

「春風べんとう」(spring breeze bento)

「コンバットべんとう」(combat bento)

「ちりめんじゃこべんとう」(dried young sardines bento)

「フランクフルトべんとう」(Frankfurt sausage bento)

「フグべんとう」(Fugu bento)

「おでんべんとう」(Oden bento)

「金目カブト煮べんとう」(Beryx splendens helmet bento)

「松坂牛の、肉じゅうたんべんとう」(Matsuzaka beef carpet bento)

「コーンまっ黄っ黄べんとう」(Corn pitch yellow bento)

「タコウィンナーべんとう」(Octopus shaped wieners bento)

「生々しいべんとう」(fresh [flesh] bento)

「ひじき黒ゴマべんとう」(hijiki seaweed and black sesame bento)

「デッサンべんとう」(rough sketch bento)

「モンドリアンべんとう」( Piet Mondrian bento)

Q: What do you think of men who make their own bento boxes and how do other people react to it?

I think that’s good because they can be more careful about the food they eat.

People react interestingly every day and it’s fun to hear their inquiries; “Does it taste good?”, “Are you really eating that?”, “Is it hearty?”, “Why did you start making bento boxes like these?”, “What’s today’s bento?”, etc…

Q: What is your favorite bento you’ve created and why did you choose it?

“Hanasaka bento” (Translates to Flower Bloom bento)

A bento’s life is as short as a flower’s, but each one of them remains in the heart and it will stay alive as a part of our body.

Similar to the flavor of my tears, I will never forget the saltiness of the pickled radish and pickled Japanese plum as well as the welcomed tingle provided by the sansho pepper in this bento.

“That was the bento I made for the NHK TV program. It took me 2 hours”, he laughs.

Q: Have you made a big mistake before?

There are actually a lot of bad mistakes.

The most memorable one is Nanakusa Bento (the seven spring herbs bento).

In Japan, people eat rice porridge with seven different spring herbs on January 7. I used those herbs, just as they are found in nature, for my bento. It turned out to be just like eating grass. It was disgusting.

However, sometimes an interesting-looking bento box, albeit bad tasting, can become a popular topic of conversation at lunch time and is often even brought up again later on. In that sense, making a mistake is not all that bad.

Q: If someone told you they wanted to start designing bentos, what advice would you give them?

I would tell them that pickled Japanese plums have an antibacterial effect, so they preserve pretty well.

In my bento box, I often put them underneath the design.

Q: Could you tell us a bento story of yours that you haven’t told anyone yet?

It’s Kani bento (crab bento).

I couldn’t put the lid on the bento, so I ended up opening up the shell and started eating a little bit of it in the morning. It almost made me late for work. Furthermore, none of my bento friends showed up in the cafeteria during lunch time, so I ended up eating the luxury bento without anyone around to see it before it was eaten. It was pathetic.

Q: As for bento-making, is there anyone you respect?

My mother.

She made bento boxes everyday when I was a child. At the time I thought it was just a trifling thing, but now I know how hard it is to continue making bento everyday. Now I really appreciate what she did for me and I respect her even more.

Q: Is there anyone out there making bento that inspires you?

Actually, I get inspired by many things, not only by someone’s bento but also by anything from different cuisine to pictures to movies to scenery to my travels.

But I’m trying to find inspiration from the ingredients themselves.

Q: Is there one particular incident involving bento that has changed your life?

Bento has changed my lunch time, myself, and has made sight and gradual changes in my life and in a small way it has also changed the daily lives of the people around me.

For example, because of bento-making, I got to be on television, held an exhibition, and was even interviewed by Tofugu-san. It’s very fun and I believe bento will continue to make such changes in my life.

Q: Share with us what your favorite bento goods and tools are.

There you go!

The first one is bento goods that I design and sell. Please contact me via my website for more information.

This second one is my collection of some of the tools that I use or have used in the past.

Q: Do you think you could make a Tofugu bento? If you could, how much would it be?

I think I could, but it may be a very plain bento. The price is free because THAT’S MY LUNCH, YO!

A few days later, the picture arrived. Mecha Kawaii! Thank you Ume-chan!

Ingredients: Rice, a cherry tomato, 2 black beans, and seasoned ground meat called Soboro.

——At the end

Thank you for your interview. If you are interested in Hige-man Ume-chan’s bento art book, get in touch with him via his blog, http://www.k3.dion.ne.jp/~umetin/.

Female Managers for Engineers

On September 2nd, a Japanese company called DWANGO Co., Ltd. implemented a new project called ‘女子マネ弁当 (Joshi-Mane Bento)’, which involved placing many female ‘managers’ in the office to motivate the company’s late-arriving male engineers, who tend to show up to work in the afternoon, to come in earlier. 女子マネ (joshi-mane) is an abbreviation of 女子マネージャー (joshi-manager) meaning female managers. 弁当 (bento), as you probably already know, is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine.

So, DWANGO hired 15 female managers to come in and motivate its workers. Surprising? Sad? Do you think it would be an effective form of motivation? It’s a difficult assessment to make. I know that if I heard there were going to be 15 more managers at my workplace, ‘motivated’ would not be the operative word. However, it seems that the new system worked out very well there. Keep in mind that they are managers, not bosses. They’re there to help manage you, not boss you around.

What are Joshi-Managers?

If you say ‘manager’ in Japan, it often indicates a ‘towel boy’ (aka waterboy) rather than an ‘office manager’. Towel boys are the kids who hang out at the sidelines with bottles of water and hand towels to the athletes at sports games. So if you say ‘joshi-mane/joshi-manager’, it is generally referring to a female manager who takes care of sports players like towel boys do.

They also take care of equipment, sports team records, and more. Now, you can imagine that a lot of boys develop crushes on their joshi-mane, possibly because they are so helpful and supportive of all the players on the team during the school year.

Joshi-mane has taken an especially important role in Japanese school culture. In fact, you find them in a lot of Japanese manga comics, novels, movies, and dramas. My favorite one is Minami Asakura, who is the heroine of a Japanese high school baseball manga called “Touch”. She’s a Meisei baseball team manager.

There is also another famous baseball team manager named Minami in a best-selling book by the title of “Moshi Dora” that is an abbreviationn of the title: もし高校野球の女子マネージャーがドラッカーのマネージメントを読んだら (Moshi Kokoyakyuno Jyoshi Manejyaga Drucker no Management wo Yondara / If the Girl Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s ‘The Practice of Management’). The novel follows Minami as she uses Peter Drucker’s famous tome on management to guide the team to success.

DWANGO and Joshi-Mane Sensation

The Dial-up Wide-Area Network Game Operation, better known by the acronym DWANGO was an early online American game service. It launched in 1994, but its operation and all its services stopped in October 1998. There is one remaining division still in operation in Japan which continues to do well today. Its subsidiaries include Niwango, which runs the popular video sharing website in Japan called ニコニコ動画 (Nico Nico Douga).

It’s a telecommunications and media company, so there are a lot of engineers working there. Historically, men have been known to vastly outnumber women in the field of engineering. Thus, it won’t surprise you that the large majority of this company’s engineers were male, which is why it’s easy to see how the resolution to the following issue was reached. Engineers tend to work late into the night and it often causes them to be late for work in the morning.

Nobuo Kawakami, the chairman of DWANGO, who’s also a Studio Ghibli producer, was contemplating how he could resolve this issue. One day, he got an idea: If the engineers were given the option of having cute girls in maid costumes hand out bento boxes to them, they might come into work on time. This experiment was more successful than Kawakami thought it would be. He then set out to improve his system and decided to hire cute female managers (joshi-mane) next. Surely, he believed, the engineers would come to work on time and work even harder.

How the ‘Joshi-Mane Bento’ System Works

Kawakami also decided that his joshi-mane girls had to wear crimson gym uniforms to make them look more like real team managers in hopes that it would be more effective in helping the engineers. Kawakami said that reason he chose that color was simply because he liked it. Their job is not strictly being in the office to encourage the workers.

Remember, the name of the project is ‘Joshi-Mane Bento’, so joshi-mane girls hand out nutritious bento lunch boxes to the engineers to help keep their tummies full and their minds sharp. Unfortunately, the bento boxes are not homemade by the joshi-mane girls, but there are 6 to 7 different kinds and all of them are supplied by DWANGO free of charge. Pretty cool, eh?

Sounds like a good deal, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the rub – in order to be allowed to receive a bento-box, you must arrive to work on time. Joshi-mane girls are also responsible for light, traditional Japanese exercises called ‘ラジオ体操 (radio-taisou)’ at 10:30 every morning. It seems that those who join the radio-taisou get a stamp on a personalized card. The stamp on your card is thing that gets you the bento-box.

This stamp is the thing that proves you showed up to work on time. So, this project not only leads engineers to come to the office on time but it also helps them get in, or stay in, shape by encouraging daily exercise and providing nutritious lunches. The atmosphere created by all the cute girls is an additional encouraging bonus for the workers. How genius is that? If you were a male engineer, you would want to join the company right away, wouldn’t you?

Of Course, There are Objections

However, this program obviously made some people displeased. Some call it a great innovative idea, whereas others call it old fashioned sexism or sexual harassment. The latter insists that Japanese women have also made some gains since the implementation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law in 1986, but in light of the recent DWANGO sensation, it is being questioned again.

Although joshi-mane culture is widely accepted in Japanese sports and schools, controversy has even arisen over the voluntary work of team managers at schools because the girls’ duties are seemingly the same as the chores of housewives. In regards to the roles joshi-mane play on sport teams, I wouldn’t call it sexim because I actually know a few girls who became joshi-mane because they simply liked sports and wanted a proactive way to support the teams of their favorite sport.

If you think that these types of roles discriminate against women, why isn’t the same standard applied to towel boys? There are actually male managers, however few, in Japan, as well. Yet, I agree with and can understand where a lot of the opinions surrounding DWANGO are coming from, though I do also find some of them a little severe. Morning sucks! Tell me about it. But I personally think that it’s little pathetic that these workers can’t even show up to work on time unless a bunch of cute girls are going to put on smiles for them.

So what do you think of the joshi-mane culture or adapting it as a company system? Is there a similar culture in your country? Do you think that it’s a good idea? Let us know your opinion and/or about your particular country in the comments below!

They’ve been featured in photo exhibitions and on TV shows in Japan and abroad. You’ve probably seen bento art before, but Miyazawa is maybe the most prolific and skilled of the many bento artists out there.

Bento art is called キャラ弁 in Japanese, a combination of the word for “character” and “bento,” and Miyazawa is a master at creating different characters using lunchtime materials.

Bento Theater

Not content with just her amazing bento box art, Miyazawa has dipped her toes into animation as well. Her YouTube channel is full of what she calls “Bento Theater.”

You can find a whole playlist here.

Do It Yourself

Maybe the best part about Miyazawa’s YouTube channel is the instructional videos; she’s kind enough to show us all how she whips up her amazing culinary works of art.

Putting together these dishes might not be especially easy or practical for you to do. Still, Miyazawa’s artistry is inspirational and might be enough to encourage me to

• Official site
• YouTube channel
• Facebook page

via Metafilter

But Wait, What be this Bento Thing?

For those unfamiliar, a bento is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japan. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables. Although bento are readily available in many places throughout Japan, it is still very common (and way more fun) for Japanese homemakers to spend time and energy creating an expertly prepared and visually pleasing lunch box.

Bento can be very elaborately arranged in styles called kyaraben and oekakiben which resemble animated characters and real people respectively. Contests are often held where bento arrangers compete for the most aesthetically pleasing arrangements.

For Your Viewing Pleasure

I hobbled around the internet a little bit and found some of the more interesting Halloween themed bento boxes for further inspection. Which one is your favorite?

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m one of those people who packs their lunch every day because going out to eat for lunch can be a serious drain on one’s finances. However, I seriously do not have the time to make my lunches as fancy as the bento boxes above. Some of them look pretty amazing and probably took more time to make than they took to be eaten. But the power of photography has preserved them forever so that we might enjoy them.

I’m sure that not all of the above bento boxes were actually fashioned by Japanese people, but that in no way detracts from them. Food art is something that rarely gets much attention, and I think these folks deserve to be recognized an appreciated for their impressive works of art.

So tell me, which Halloween bento is your favorite? Which one looks the most appetizing? Ever made a totally rad bento box of your own? What was it? Let us know in the comments!