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The story
A thread about the realities of life in Japanese prisons got heated on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” board. It revealed that the daily food budget for all three meals comes to just ¥590 — a figure that drew attention for being higher than the roughly ¥300 spent on school lunches — while posters also described the restrictions of prison life, like baths being limited to two or three times a week depending on the season, with guards even watching inmates’ hand movements in the tub. Opinion split over the small wages paid for prison labor, with some arguing “it’s a punishment, so getting paid at all is strange” and others calling it “fair compensation for the work,” and the discussion expanded into the issue of elderly inmates needing nursing care.
What people said
It's not smelly — it's barley rice, so it just smells like barley.
The phrase "stinky rice" comes from having a toilet right in the same room where you eat — that's the smell they're talking about, not the food itself.
No commute hell and a full 3 hours of free time a day? Sounds pretty great every single day, honestly.
Sure, you'd have free time, but could you survive without your phone?
You basically wake up around 4am and then keep drifting back to sleep again and again.
I love drawing, so give me paper and a pencil and I could live like that forever.
Saw it in some prison manga — if you're in a shared cell you apparently get at least a little TV time too.
Sendai's prison food was way better than this.
It's not like decent people end up in there.
Guys screaming in their cells, loudly messing with the guy next door —
you know how every school has a handful of troublemakers?
Imagine every one of those from every school in the country all crammed into the same room.
That's rough. A lot of these guys have nothing left to look forward to except meals.
You're kind of a thug yourself, so you'll be fine.
At that level you might as well just go on welfare.
Honestly, outdoor school camp already puts you through something pretty similar.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HPwDWVxbEAAInG3.jpg
They're working, so of course they should get paid.
It's a *sentence*. Can you even read?
And that's exactly why — since they're doing prison labor, getting paid is only natural.
It's supposed to be punishment.
Get it?
Whether they get paid is a separate issue. The government clearly agrees, since it's the one paying them.
If you're not feeling well, you go to the infirmary.
Prison labor isn't punishment — it's more like a welfare measure for keeping inmates mentally stable, not some mandatory duty you're forced into.
If you're sick, you're allowed to rest.
Actually, these days prisons have more elderly inmates needing care than anything else, so they've basically turned into nursing homes.
Those inmates can't work, so most of them are bedridden.
The government agrees, which is why they get a decent enough wage.
So you also think it's natural for prisoners to get paid for serving their sentence, then?
This is a better meal than what you guys eat.
In summer it's every other day.
I don't think any prison lets you bathe every single day.
You get 15 minutes in the bathroom itself, then the remaining 5 minutes to undress, towel off your wet body, and get dressed.
When you're soaking in the tub, you have to keep your fingers above the water surface the whole time so the guard watching can confirm you're not doing anything weird underwater.
It's twice a week in winter and three times a week in summer.
The Justice Ministry's regulation only requires twice a week, but they do make some allowance for the heat.
Welfare is way easier, honestly.
But if you're in prison long enough, don't you end up turning into someone who just waits for instructions, so you don't know what to do with yourself once you're out?
On workdays the guards watch you at lunch, but apparently in private cells there's no monitoring, so anything goes.
Well, bullying is pretty much the only entertainment they've got in there.
And apparently that's just comparing ingredient costs. I guess milk is what eats up the school lunch budget.
If they crammed milk into the prison food budget too, the meals would probably end up looking pretty sad.
Prisons also buy up cheap off-spec produce that can't be sold on the market from partner farms, so budget-wise they're actually in a better spot than school lunches.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
The figure of ¥590 a day for prison food is the Justice Ministry’s standard for ingredient costs, which looks higher than the roughly ¥300 spent on school lunches — but that’s an ingredients-only comparison that leaves out labor and facility costs. Likewise, baths being “three times a week in summer, twice a week in winter” comes from a Justice Ministry regulation that sets the baseline at twice a week, with the extra summer session added in recent years as a heatstroke precaution. Where the thread split was over whether a prison sentence is purely punishment or whether the labor deserves pay — posters disagreed over whether the reward money paid to inmates for prison labor should count as a “wage” or as something that cuts against the point of punishment. In reality, prison labor is mandatory, and the money paid is a small amount under a separate system from ordinary market wages — a distinction that isn’t widely understood. The thread also touched on how Japanese prisons are increasingly functioning like nursing facilities due to a growing population of elderly inmates needing care, making this a topic that doesn’t reduce neatly to a simple “hellish or comfortable” debate.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Images] Prison Life Turned Out to Be Seriously Hellish.”
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