From our other sites
The story
On 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (Anything Live-Commentary) board, a thread blew up discussing how during the Showa and Heisei eras, elementary school students used to carry school lunch to their own classrooms themselves. Posters traded details of the old lunch-duty system one after another — one role carried the food canisters off the serving cart, another pushed trolleys loaded with crates of milk bottles or cartons. Some schools had no elevator, meaning kids hauled everything up to the third floor by hand, while others had dedicated food-service elevators — showing how differences in school building facilities shaped very different experiences. Several commenters also recalled a “custom” of groveling to other classes for a share of their lunch after spilling your own, with some wondering whether today’s kids have any clue this used to be a thing.
What people said
That's basically a memory of getting ganged up on and beaten by your own classmates, right?
You absolute idiot…
After a full-on crying fit, I had to go on an apology tour from 1st grade all the way to 6th grade just to get them to share some with me.
I will never forgive you for this, Mr. Takahashi.
My school had a food-service elevator for that, so…
Sounds like it's straight out of the latest episode of 'Oishii Kyuushoku' (a comedy drama about a teacher obsessed with school lunch)
We did sometimes invite kids from the special-needs class over 🥺
They were each loaded on their own cart, so the weight didn't really matter
Haha, that's so nostalgic lol
That countryside school got shut down ages ago, and it never had an elevator. Three-story building.
At my elementary school the handles on the food canisters had some kind of spring coiled around them, and looking back now, that thing was slippery and would spin — just not built for little kids' hands lol
Oh yeah, that thing. It definitely used to spin.
Now that you mention it, rolling that trolley around was seriously fun. Kind of amazing we elementary school boys went full throttle with it and never once spilled it.
It would peel off in a thin layer and leave the cap stuck there lol. Then you're stuck choosing between shoving it in or digging it out with a pencil.
I did drop an entire crate of milk bottles once. That was me.
Happened a few times a year. Whoever spilled it would go bow their head to other classes and beg for little bits here and there.
We sometimes used a room with a name like "lunch room" that could fit two classes at once. It had an oven, so we'd toast the bread from the lunch in there.
They make you set up and clean up yourselves. That's part of the education, after all.
Main dish / soup
Sides and dessert
Milk (carton)
Bread
How did we even get all that up the stairs? I honestly can't remember.
We basically carried it in pairs. Brings back memories.
Makes you realize 'Queen's Classroom' (a drama about a ruthlessly strict teacher) had it right all along — whatever's left over after the spill just gets handed out in order of grades, and that's that!
That probably varies by school. Mine was three stories, two grades per floor. I'm part of the second baby-boomer generation, and even though everyone kept saying the kid population was shrinking, my year had the most classes — three per grade. No idea how big actual "mammoth schools" got though.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
School lunch in Japan didn’t always work the way people might assume — rather than cafeteria staff or a central kitchen delivering food straight to the classroom, it was once standard for students themselves to carry the food canisters and milk bottles there. This wasn’t just a quirky relic of the past; it reflected an educational philosophy of teaching cooperation and independence through lunch duty, and the thread split between commenters calling the system “inefficient” and others defending it as “part of the education.” The thread also highlighted how much the burden varied depending on a school’s layout — number of floors, whether there was an elevator — meaning even people from the same Showa/Heisei generation had very different experiences. Details like when milk switched from bottles to cartons, and whether schools used carts, trolleys, or plain manual carrying, differed from school to school, revealing how much these “universal” memories actually vary by generation and region. At the same time, many of the spilled-lunch anecdotes carry a whiff of exaggeration, so it’s worth remembering as a reader that the line between what really happened and shared “this definitely happened to everyone” folklore is a blurry one.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Showa-born people used to carry school lunch to the classroom themselves.”
Leave a Reply