Allison

Obentōs are boxed lunches Japanese mothers make for their nursery school children. These lunches have a cultural order and meaning. An everyday practice of Japanese life is food in an Obentō. Customarily these are highly crafted elaborations of food: a multitude of miniature portions, artistically designed and precisely arranged, in a container that is sturdy and cute. Culture is constructing both the world for people and people for specific worlds. The constructions of our cultural symbols are endowed with, or have the power. Culture has been revealed by much theoretical work conducted both inside and outside the discipline of anthropology. There have tow major structures of power in modern capitalist societies. The first is State Apparatus (SA): the second is Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). The power of ideology in ISA can be both more far-reaching and insidious than the AS’s power of coercion. In Japan much attention is focused on the obentō, investing it with significance far beyond that of the merely pragmatic, functional one of sustaining a child with nutritional foodstuffs. Japanese food must be organized, reorganized, arranged, stylized, and reutilized to appear in a design that is visually attractive. Foods are broken or cut to make contrasts of color, texture, and shape. The naturalization of food is rendered through two main devices: 1. by constantly hinting at and appropriating the nature that comes from outside. 2. is to accentuate and perfect the preparation process to such an extent that the food appears not only to be natural, but more nearly perfect than without human invention ever could be. There have two important orders; language and signification. World demands, knowledge and ideology become fused, and education emerges as the apparatus for pedagogical and ideological indoctrination. In Japan education, the role of the state is not limited, but codified authorities granted to the Ministry of Education. The obentō is intended to ease a child’s discomfiture and to allow a child’s mother to manufacture something of herself and the home to accompany the child as movers into potentially threatening outside world, and thus a representation of what the mother is and what the child should become. The nursery-school system differentiates between the child who does and the child who does not manage the multifarious and constant riuals of nursery school. The aestheticization of the obentō is by far its most intriguing aspect for a cultural anthropologist. Much of a woman’s labor over obentō stems from some agenda other than that of getting the child to eat an entire lunch-box. Food is manipulated into some other form than it assumes either naturally or upon being cook, and by ordered by some human rather than natural principle. These two structures are the ones most important in shaping the nursery school obentō as well, and the inclination to design realistic imagery is primarily a means by which these other culinary codes are learned by and made pleasurable for child.

Japanese child must eat the obentō; the mother must make an obentō the child will eat. Both mother and child are being judged: the subjectivities of both are being guided by the nursery school as an institution.