School lunches were first served in 1889 at a temple school in Yamagata Prefecture for children who could not afford to attend other schools. This practice spread throughout Japan until World War II, when food shortages made it difficult to continue serving lunch to students. Backed by the American government and charity support, school lunches were reinstated after the war. This funding disappeared when Japan regained its sovereignty in 1951, leading to backlash from Japanese families at the lack of school meals available to their children. As a result, the government started to take over funding in 1952 and passed the School Lunch Act in 1954. The School Lunch Act established lunches as a fundamental component of students’ education, and the law still prevails today (Katsuo 2025).
Considering the concept of lunches as a core educational component, I will first explore the idea of shokuiku. Shokuiku means food and nutrition education, with “shoku-” meaning food and “-iku” meaning education. In 2005, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries officially instituted an act that touched on the importance of this kind of education. A main goal of the Basic Act on Shokuiku was to improve Japanese citizens’ health and make them aware of their responsibility for their health (Assmann 2017). It described shokuiku as “fundamental to intellectual education, moral education, and physical education” and as having a “significant impact on [children’s] physical and mental growth as well as their character formation” (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries 2005). As shokuiku is meant to impact every facet of a person’s growth and character development, teaching children shokuiku from a young age is said to instill healthy eating habits that are meant to benefit them their whole lives. This is enacted in schools through the variety of nutritious dishes served in the lunches and through the effort to educate students on why the meals are good for them.
The following descriptions are from my experiences at a Japanese public school. At every meal, there is always rice, bread, or noodles, a meat or fish, and occasionally soup; once or twice a week, and on special occasions, there is a dessert. One example of a real lunch menu is the following from a lunch sheet that I received in elementary school: milk, white rice, mackerel marinated in miso, seasoned Napa Cabbage, and tofu egg soup – 631 calories and 26.4 grams of protein. These lunch menus are handed out to all the students at the start of the month, with a list of the meals for the following weeks. It is in table format with columns detailing each ingredient and why that item is nutritious. When it is for younger children, it will say “food that will become energy,” or “food that is good for the body,” instead of detailing protein or carbohydrates. The last column is the total number of calories and grams of protein. Japanese schools aim to make students aware of what they are eating and the nutritional value of each item from a young age; in this way, shokuiku is evidently an integrated, central component of a student’s education. This practice of shokuiku and the variety of foods served has led to students being exposed to a wide variety of dishes as well. By the time students are in their last year of elementary school, they have become familiar with various foods, gained the ability to appreciate and eat foods that they previously disliked, and expanded their palates (Izumi et al. 2020).
With this variety of foods served, there comes an expectation that all students finish everything they are given in an allotted time, although teachers generally allow them to get more or less of a certain dish. In the younger grades, whenever there was food left over after all the students were served, teachers would go around the classroom and distribute it. In the older grades, people often played rock-paper-scissors for leftovers. When no one was interested, teachers would ask students – usually the boys who ate more food than others – to eat the leftovers even when they said they were full. This norm shows how there is an emphasis on finishing all the food that was given to that classroom, even more than on everyone finishing their own plates; there is pressure both on the individual and on the class as a whole to not leave leftovers. One study found that at a certain elementary school in Tokyo, school dietitians measured and reported the amount of leftover food to the principals; in other schools, there were reward systems and incentives in place to motivate children to eat (Izumi et al. 2020). These techniques are effective: only about 6.9 percent of food waste is produced from the national school lunch program (Izumi et al. 2020). This result would not be possible without expectations placed on students and teachers to ensure that all the food is consumed.
Moreover, there is a strict timeframe for students to eat their lunches. Students who do not do so often stay in the room while the rest of the class goes on to cleaning or recess. Some teachers even set aside allotted time for students to eat in silence to ensure that no one is too distracted to finish eating (Izumi et al. 2020), creating an atmosphere in which students often glance at the clocks to finish eating on time.