I'm living and working as an ALT in Japan. I teach English, survive earthquakes and Typhoons, and try everything I encounter. I'll use this space to collect blogs, photos and other awesome artifacts of my adventure along the way. 
Japanese school lunch fun facts:
- School lunches are the same for every school in the city, so every student (be they elementary, junior high, or high school) eats the same food no matter what school they’re at.
- In fact, (most) schools don’t even have kitchens. The school lunches are actually made daily at the school lunch center (no clue where it is) and then delivered to each school from there. Unfortunately, they don’t have the nice Domino’s “Heat Wave” technology to keep the food warm in transit, so by the time you eat it, the school lunch is always anywhere between lukewarm and cold (soup and everything).
- Most schools also don’t have lunch rooms, so the students eat at their desks in the classrooms. And while I’m on that subject, I’ll mention that students stay at the same desk all day long. In the US, students usually move from classroom to classroom and the teachers stay in the same room the whole day, but it’s just the opposite here. Students stay in the same classroom all day and the teachers go from room to room.
- After lunch every day is “cleaning period,” during which the students not only clean up their lunch stuff, but they clean the WHOLE school. Schools in Japan don’t have janitors and so the students do all the cleaning. Every day for about 20 minutes, the students work together to dust, sweep, and scrup the classrooms, hallways, bathrooms, etc, etc, etc. It’s pretty impressive. American students have it SO good.
I found this fascinating.
I’m quite jealous of the junior /elementary schools - high school kids byo lunch… but I’m lucky to be exempt from cleaning time too…muahahah
