Bento

Calling a bento a “lunch box” doesn’t do it justice. It is a lunch box in the sense that sometimes it comes in the shape of a box (and sometimes not), it often has the picture of a cultural icon on the lid (My Little Pony, Ultra-man, He-Man, Hamutaro, and Mr. T. come immediately to mind), and it contains a lunch inside. However, lunch boxes are typically comparatively massive, rectangular in shape, and have a hinged door that clasps tightly shut by two levered latches, located next to the handle of the lunch box. Examples of typical contents found in a lunch boxes include a thermos (usually full of milk or soup), a sandwich, some vegetable sticks, a bag of chips or cookies, a box of juice, and a stick of string cheese. It is also interesting to note that most people stop using lunch boxes after leaving elementary school and switch to the brown paper bag as the vessel of choice for their midday meals. I fondly remember my lunch box, but its contents were always predictable and partly pre-packaged. Opening a bento is more of a mini-adventure.
If you are lucky there may be treasures under the lid of the bento bako, just waiting for you to uncover them at lunch time. Geisha Asobi has some interesting glimpses Japanese culture, including a link to some few highly stylized bento designs. As for a bento that emphasizes equality in form and function, I like these bento made by Mizuko Ito, who examines the question “Are bento an artistic form of motherly love, or are they just another oppresive tool used to shape Japanese society?”. Anyhow, you may notice that these bento pictures have been snapped from a cellular phone camera (she also studies the effects that cellphones have on society- pretty interesting stuff), like the ones on Justin’s moblog, or the smaller pictures that I was posting up until the demise of the camera on my D251.
This is diverging from the bento theme of this post but still related, in the sense that if your bento contained some undercooked meat or fish you might grow a 28 foot-long friend in your intestines.