This free printable sheet is a chart of what goes inside a Japanese bento: eight lunchbox foods drawn one by one in thick, simple outlines, with the Japanese word for each written underneath. There is no box drawn around them — the items sit on plain white paper, which keeps every shape large and easy to fill, and makes the page just as usable for a three-year-old as for someone working slowly with a shaky hand. The heading across the top reads “what’s inside a bento.” Download the A4 PDF and print it — no registration.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
What was the thing you most hoped to find in your lunch as a child?
Is there a packed lunch from a school outing or a sports day that you still remember?
Do you remember someone making your lunch for you — or making one yourself?
Of the eight foods on this page, which would you put in your own box?
How old is the bento?
Carrying a packed meal is a great deal older than the word for it: dried cooked rice that travellers took on the road is recorded centuries before anyone said bento. The word itself, and the lacquered compartmented box that goes with it, are usually placed in the Azuchi-Momoyama period of the late 1500s, when boxed meals were carried to blossom viewing and to no and kabuki performances — the makunouchi bento, literally “between the acts,” takes its name from that theatre habit. One correction to a claim that circulates widely, including on the Japanese version of this page: the station lunchbox, ekiben, cannot date from the Edo period, because it depends on railways. It belongs to the Meiji era, and is usually dated to 1885 at Utsunomiya, though other stations have claimed earlier ones. The box travelled well beyond Japan in the last few decades, and “bento” is now an English word for a compartmented lunch container whatever is packed in it.
What are the eight foods, and what do the labels say?
Top row, left to right. おにぎり (onigiri), a rice ball with a band of nori seaweed — the band is filled solid black in the drawing, so either leave it as it is or work a very dark green-brown over it. からあげ (karaage), a piece of fried chicken; a patchy mix of golden and deeper brown reads far better than one flat tone. たまごやき (tamagoyaki), the rolled omelette, pale yellow with a slightly darker edge along the seam. ウインナー (uinnā), a sausage — and not a plain one: it has been cut into legs and given a face. That is the tako-san wiener, the little octopus sausage that has been a fixture of Japanese lunchboxes for generations, and it is the one item on the sheet that most people outside Japan will not recognise. Bottom row: ブロッコリー (burokkorī), broccoli; ミニトマト (mini tomato), a cherry tomato; ゼリー (zerī), a cup of fruit jelly; and バナナ (banana). The top row is the savoury half of a box, the bottom row is the colour and the sweet.
How is a bento actually packed?
The rule every Japanese cookbook repeats is to let the rice and the cooked food cool completely before the lid goes on. A warm lid traps steam, and trapped steam is what turns a sealed box sour by lunchtime. Cooks avoid anything with loose liquid, and pack sauces separately. Umeboshi and a splash of vinegar are traditional additions and acidity does slow some bacteria, but the effect is local and modest — it is not a substitute for cooling the food and keeping the box cool. The other piece of received wisdom is about looks rather than safety: aim for five colours — red, yellow, green, white and black — which is simply how a box ends up varied instead of beige. That rule is also a useful one to borrow while colouring this page, since the eight items were chosen to cover exactly those five.
