My comment was less an attack on Japanese taste than a defense of generations of American moms who have tried in their ways to make their children’s lunches nutritious and attractive. A lot better than giving your kid a couple of bucks and telling her to buy pizza and Coke. And I do think that as corny and commercial as a movie tie-in lunch box may be, it still counts as decorated — as opposed to a used brown paper bag.

There is much to admire in Japanese culture, but I dislike using it as a mallet to bop other cultures on the head.

Denis Dutton

thanks for the detailed comment!

Your note about “content” made me think. Perhaps “content” was not the right work. I hoped to convey the difference between something of substance and something of no substance. The Japanese lunch, in all its beauty, has substance because its beauty and allure are crafted out of the food itself.

The American lunchbox, by contrast, has allure through its mere packaging. Moreover, its packaging is symbolic of a mechanized, standardized, and portable product.

By contrast, the Japanese lunch is one of a kind. Now perhaps it is not as nutritious as I may have intimated, but its is nonetheless uniquely crafted. My point was not about fitness or diet or wholeness of food but of standardization, portability and art.

Your points are well taken, and interesting to boot! Thanks for commenting!

In particular, your sentence, “Forget about the content of the thing, instead focus on its packaging, its marketing or its uniformity” describes perfectly the Japanese approach to food marketing. Talk to anyone who has lived in Japan for any period of time and attempted to follow a clean diet of unprocessed foods with tightly controlled macronutrients. It’s particularly rough for bodybuilders or powerlifters, since good cuts of red meat are almost impossible to find. Even if you go heavy on fish, it’s exceedingly difficult to get 2 grams of protein per pound of bodyweight in Japan — instead, you get expensive tiny portions with tons of stuff you don’t want mixed in there.

Seriously, the Japanese are the last people on earth I would expect to be accused of caring about the nutritional content of their food. Most of the foods are highly processed, produce and fresh meat are scarce, and the fad diet right now is the “banana weight loss diet” (highly evolved concept of dietary fitness right there). There is a reason that the Japanese are not known for exporting fitness or dietary science. I mean, this is the nation that invented ramen.

Now, you can make the case that the Japanese care very much about the aesthetic beauty of their food, and that they are supreme among the world for elegant simplicity. They make uniformly mass-produced food items that are elegantly simple and beautiful. But that is completely different from caring about the “content” of the food, as you asserted.