bento

The best bento will contain an utterly fresh and interesting assortment of foodstuffs, including rice, meat, pickles, fish, and vegetables.

Buying dept store bentos is one of the ways a vistor can cut the cost of staying in Japan. In fact, some dept stores even provide refrigerated lockers for a couple of hundred yen, so that you can buy your dinner at lunch time and collect later in the day.

A lot of people complain about Japanese tomatoes.

These people have never lived in Hokkaido, and had early-autumn tomatoes picked from the vine a scarce minute before they're sliced and placed carefully into a tiny tinfoil cup before being inserted, with ultimate mathematical precision, into a tiny lacquered box. Actually, it's two boxes that fit together, which combined are no larger than a Tom Clancy paperback.

The box is wrapped up in, ironically enough, a Mickey and Minnie cloth. I forgot my Keroppi chopsticks, so I'm eating with horrible disposible chopsticks.

Sliced tomatoes are the simplest dish in the box, which also contains the following:

• kinpira, toothpick-thin carrot and burdock root, simmered in soy
• sauteed rape leaf & sesame seed
• saba miso, mackerel simmered in miso and ginger
• strange cocktail wieners with cheese in them
• shirasu, tiny dried fish, served on a bed of Japanese white rice

It's accompanied by a thermos of cool jasmine tea, the oolong kind, not the green kind.

My girlfriend's mother makes my bento every day. As sadly reaffirmative as this is of sexist Japanese culture, where "she wouldn't make my bento" is an acceptable reason for divorce, I can't help but be happy.

This is the best lunch I've ever had, day and day again.