Obento, My Bento

My allergies are pretty bad here. Just before I sat down to write, my eyes started itching. No big deal, of course. After all, I have Japanese eye drops easily within reach. And reach I do.

Drip. Drip. One in each eye.

There’s a short silence. The world stops. This is the part where I remember. “Wait, these drops burn like Massachusetts maiden in 1692.” Then the burning begins. I squint and grunt and make sounds unlike any I’ve made previously in my life. But that doesn’t stop the burning. You would think this kind of sensation is not conducive to destroying allergies, but it is. After a good five minutes, I get up off the floor and my eyes feel perfectly fine.

The only thing is, the drops smell like bleach. They really, really do. And if I find out that these eye drops are just bleach in a tiny bottle, I’ll be really mad. Because I could be getting a huge bottle of bleach to pour in my eyes for the same price as the little one. Also, putting bleach in my eyes might be bad.

But onto the topic of the day. This is a serious topic, so no more of this funny business. We can’t joke about things like this. It’s life or death. I’m talking, of course, about food.

Food is important. It feeds all the animals and some of us humans. It feeds everything from the mighty blue whale to the tiniest of walnuts with eyes painted on it. Everything needs (or at least wants) food. And I am no exception. I need food.

Before I came to Japan, I knew there would be some adjusting. Food is different here. My stomach, I knew, would have trouble adjusting to unprocessed food with no high fructose corn syrup. But it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. It couldn’t be too hard. After all, I like Japanese food. It can’t be all bad, right?

I was right. It wasn’t all bad. Much of it was, and still is, very very good. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that most of the food here is “fantastically delicious” or “deliciomongous” or evern “satisfactory. But there is one form of food I hate. One that is so foul, that it hurts me to say its name. Obento.

Technically, obento isn’t a food, but rather a collection of foods in a bento box. Bento boxes have little compartments for dropping random foods into. My school doesn’t have a cafeteria, so the best thing they can offer the teachers is a bento delivery service.

If you look up obento in google images, you won’t see what I eat. Probably because your family filter is on. The bentos we get are loaded with preservatives to keep them lasting for the seven weeks it takes to ship to my school. It usually consists of one main compartment of some sort of fried fish or battered animal, and then several small compartments consisting of various slimes. Yes, they are slimes. Sometimes you can see food you recognize swimming in the slimes, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s slime.

Whenever I see a new slime in my bento I lean over to one of my kids.

Me: “What is this?”

Kid: (Something in Japanese).

Me: “Is it good?”

Kid: No.

When I first got my obentos, I approached them differently. “I’m in a new country, with a different culture,” I thought. “I should be open to new things.” So I ate my slime. Every day, whether I liked it or not, I ate my slime. Sometimes, the slime looked like mashed up leaves mixed with coffee. Leaves are kind of like vegetables, so I would lie to myself and say it was good for me.

Sometimes the slime was corn mixed with mayonnaise. Corn is good for you, right? What about chewy slivers of plastic fish bait? That’s got lots of vitamin A. More like Vitamin suck.

Oh, did I mention these obentos are cold? Yes, not a lick of heat in them. So even the fried animal, which would probably taste good, is cold and soaking in its own greases. Needless to say, I didn’t look forward to lunch.

“Well stupid,” you might say. “Why didn’t you just stop buying them?” Because I was trapped. You can’t buy a bento-a-day. No. You have a to buy a long string of tickets to last you the month. Now who looks stupid, you idiot!

So I was cornered. My back was against the wall and a seven-foot tall bento monster was in front of me insisting that I eat him. And eat I did. Day in and day out. Slime after slime. Until the day came, yesterday, when my tickets ran out.

“Huzzah!” I cried, like a Ren Fest visitor accepting his custom leatherwork. My captivity was over. But what to do now? I had to eat something. I had to pack a lunch, but the lunches I’m used to packing in America are impossible here. Sandwiches are right out, as are snacks not containing octopus. So what then?

Soba.

I had been told weeks ago by my friend Dan that soba is the quickest, easiest, and healthiest lunch in the universe. You just boil the noodles, put them in a container, and mix them with broth. Done.

So I went to the store and bought the noodles and the broth. I came home and happily boiled the soba. I stored it in a tupperware container for the next day. But what about the broth? It came in a bag, and I wasn’t about to take a bag of liquid to school and cut it open over my desk. Likewise, I wasn’t going to put the broth in any tupperware that could come open in my bag. So no broth. Big deal. I could handle it.

I got to school today. I taught some lessons, talked to some children, then lunch rolled around. I pulled my container of soba out of the staff fridge and sat down to eat. To my surprise, I found that soba, like most wet foods put in a refrigerator, sticks together. But it was still edible and it wasn’t obento.

I stabbed at my cube of soba, doing my best to cut it with my chopsticks. After the first bite I thought, “Wow, this tastes like nothing. But nothing is better than bento.” So I chewed forward. After the second bite I thought, “Wow, this is the most boring thing I’ve ever eaten.”

And yes, it was boring. Bland does not describe its flavor. Mind-numbingly dull is a better description. It’s like there’s a party in your mouth and everyone’s invited, but nobody came.

Halfway through the meal, I was literally in pain from how bored I was. But I wouldn’t go back. I couldn’t go back to those bentos! Never! So I pressed on. I chomped and chewed through bite after skull-bashingly dull bite. It was as boring as a school field trip to an apple orchard or watching a Mickey Mouse cartoon.

By the end, my stomach was full, but my mouth was about ready to divorce me. And sadly, I still have no way to carry my broth to school. My neighbor Nikki said to get a thermos, but I fell asleep after I came home from school today. When I woke up it was 8:00pm, which is far too late for any store to be open in Japan.

I must be off to bed soon, as it is late again and I can’t risk random napping tomorrow too. But before I go, one thing:

I have recently decided that Fleischer's Bimbo cartoons are the best thing ever. At least the very early ones are. While every other cartoon studio in the early thirties was looping the same dancing cows for forty seconds at a time (I’m talking to you, Disney), Fleischer studios was saying, “Hey, what weird crap can we make Bimbo do?” And man were they weird! So here’s a Halloween toon for you, to usher in the season!

I have to finish preparing my Halloween lesson before I go to bed. Those kids are gonna get their eyebrows scared off. Good morning to my friends in America and Oyasumi to my friends here.