I make Japanese style bento lunch for myself and my hubby twice a week. For me it is just a good way to manage ingredients in the fridge and to eat well economically. The content of our bento is based more on practicality and flavors, with some attention to detail. I don't spend time to embellish it to the artistic level.

Anyway, "bento" has become international fad now, (not in a huge scale, but still) and I see some on DA as well. So I thought I'd feature them.

For a reference, here is a great collection of store-bought Japanese bento images found on flicker.
The ones you can purchese at train stations are called "ekiben". (eki=staion, ben=short for bento) [link]

I tried to pick the ones that have "character" theme. These kind of designed bento are commonly called "chara-ben" or "kyara-ben". The word is a mix of "character" and "bento" pronounced with Japanese accent.
Here are some I found on DA.



And below is a collection of Japanese blogs that shows amazing "kyara-ben" artistry. Check out the details! When you are at their page, scroll down to view all the mages.

[link] (scroll down all the way to see "Death Note" characters. I was impressed with Ryuk and Misa. )

[link] (Naruto and others. Scroll down to see other thumb pictures)

[link] (Naruto. Scroll down to see all the images. Colors and details in these are ! )

[link] (cute and colorful animal characters.)

[link] (Bleach characters etc. Nice photos and the rest of bento box content looks great too)


People use all sort of ingredients, but usually using rice as a ground like "canvas". The most intricate, black and white manga-like depictions seen on the Japaense sites above are often done with nori (sheets of dry sea weed) carefully cut and pressed onto a sheet of sliced cheese, or thinly cooked egg white, or crepe, (or sandwich meat for skin tones) laying on top of rice. Oh, slab of kamaboko is also used for detailed works. (It's a sort of fish cake made with white fish meats, except the meat is finely ground and sieved before steamed so that it is very dense and smooth. It has hard boiled egg like texture) These detailed ones can take a lot of time. (People say 30 min to 1hour sometimes just to do the image. Some use copied image as a base which saves time, but still that does not include the rest of cooking)
Others use crepe with food coloring to get unusual anime colors, cut out in the shape, and use nori as black outlines.


Hope you enjoy the features!