Lunch ON! - Season 9 / Year 2020

Every day, Hitomi a midwife in Osaka Prefecture, Japan, takes the bento packed lunch to work that is made by her husband Tomohiro. Tomohiro wakes up early every day to cook his wife's lunch and also breakfast and dinner for his wife and daughter. How is this possible? Well, Tomohiro is actually a teacher at a night high school, so he has a little bit of time in the mornings. Tomohiro does all this to of course support his hard-working wife, but he also has another reason. Tune in to find out what it is!

Mr. Matsumoto will in a few days retire from the Japanese company he's worked at for 41 long years. For the last few years, to watch his weight, he's been having the bento packed lunch his wife makes for him, but on the very last day on the job, he has a plan to eat a very special lunch that is perfect for the occasion.

In another segment, we meet a type designer. The task of designing Japanese typefaces is extremely arduous, but she gets it done with the healthy lunch she makes for herself.

We go to Nagano Prefecture, central Japan to visit a secondhand store that is known for handling timber reclaimed from old buildings. But they don't just buy such materials and then put them on their shelves. Instead, they go to sites where buildings are being torn down to salvage each piece of material themselves. Then, they dress the materials and sell them, providing details of where the material was taken from. For lunch, the workers enjoy a staff meal made by an employee who is quite a skillful cook!

Racehorse Almond Eye recently won the biggest horseracing title in Japan, but she didn't do it all on her own. There is a whole team of horse trainers who made it happen, and we go to eastern Japan to visit the team's boss. For him, every single day is about gathering information and data from his crew and observing the horses to spot even the slightest changes. And the lunch that always keeps him going is either curry udon noodles or a ham and cheese toast topped with fermented soybeans!

We go to Toyama Prefecture, central Japan to visit a factory that makes fishcake called "kamaboko." Although "kamaboko" is eaten all across Japan, those made here are especially decorative, as the local culture is to give them to guests who come to weddings and other celebratory occasions. Fresh fish is ground down to paste at 5 in the morning, and the product is shipped out in the evening. As the workers start so early, lunchtime comes at around 8. We look at the bento lunches of the fishcake makers.

We go to Shizuoka Prefecture, central Japan to visit a helicopter life flight team. The team consists of doctors, nurses, pilots, mechanics and dispatchers. They stand by at all times, ready to provide emergency care to patients in remote areas. For them, there's not a single second that can be wasted when a call comes in about a life that needs to be saved. When it comes to lunch, they eat when they can, but as soon as that call comes in, they jump right back into action.

We visit an ironworks situated in Yamagata Prefecture, northern Japan. At the factory, there is a monthly lunch day wherein the staff take turns cooking soups from other countries. The task wouldn't be that difficult if they were allowed to use a recipe and have access to the right ingredients, but since the aim of this lunch tradition is to train the workers' ability to use their imagination to make things, the staff do just that, improvising as they go along.

We visit a coffee plantation in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture. The plantation is run by a family, and what is surprising is that they only recently began growing coffee. They used to mainly grow flowers, but after suffering much damage from a typhoon, the father decided the switch on his own, without even running the numbers! To stay afloat, the son has to work hard, but he has no complaints because the coffee they make tastes great, and his father is having the time of his life!

We visit a restaurant of Okinawan cuisine, not in the tropical prefecture of Okinawa, but in Niigata Prefecture, a snowy region by the Sea of Japan. The restaurant manager, who is a huge fan of the program, cooks lunch for his staff every day, and does so using "mentsuyu," the standard noodle sauce of Japan. Whether it be meat sauce or curry, he always uses noodle sauce. In fact, he's so into cooking with noodle sauce that he dreams of one day publishing his own cookbook of his ingenious noodle sauce dishes.

We visit a factory in Miyagi Prefecture, northern Japan that processes and cans seafood. Their most popular product is their canned mackerel. Every morning, 2 purchasers from the factory go to the market to buy fresh mackerel, which are canned that very day. Although their factory was destroyed by the terrible tsunami of 2011, their mackerel cans miraculously survived, and that story gave the local people hope right when they were faced with the daunting task of rebuilding their community.

We stake out in a soba noodles shop in the busy city of Ikebukuro, Tokyo for delivery orders to come in. Then, we tag along for the deliveries and visit the people who ordered lunch. We meet a priest at a Buddhist temple, teachers at a cram school for high school students, a man in his 80's who looks extremely young and fit, and a couple of frank ladies who work at a company that handles sales for newspaper companies. There's no shortage of interesting characters, so make sure to tune in!

We go to Hyogo Prefecture, western Japan to visit a factory that handcrafts scissors for hairstylists. Scissors for cutting hair have to cut extremely well, and the process to customize scissors so that they can do just that demands unthinkable exactness. At this factory, they even handle repairs of scissors that are decades old, but that task can only be carried out by the best, most experienced technicians. Tune in to find out the detailed work of scissor crafters and also what they do for lunch.

To cheer up fans, Montedio Yamagata, in the second division of Japanese professional soccer, has been posting pictures of the food their players cook for themselves at home during the coronavirus pandemic. We get an inside look at one player's expert cooking skills as he films himself preparing and eating his own lunch at home.

In another segment, we visit an inn with over a hundred years of history to hear about the lunch loved by the late world-renowned film director Imamura Shohei.

We visit a family-run silk textile factory in Fukushima Prefecture, northern Japan. The textiles produced at this company have been featured in a famous designer's Paris Collection. Currently, in this time of the coronavirus pandemic, they are concentrating on making masks. Although the silk masks they make are not cheap, they are in high demand as they offer excellent quality. For lunch, the family sits together to enjoy the food cooked by the current president's grandson, who is an aspiring chef.

The Hondas are a married couple in Tokyo who have been running an event planning company together for 10 years. They used to eat out 3 times a day, every day, but ever since the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down, Kae, the wife has been cooking healthy bento lunch for the 2 of them. And although her cooking is not so tasty-looking, that effort has produced amazing results: in just 2 months of their bento life, the husband has already lost 5 kilograms!

There is a hospital in Kyoto that has been open for almost 120 years. Seeing the restaurants and inns of the community suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, the director of the hospital decided to regularly order lunch for the hospital staff from local establishments. That's 200 meals a day, 6 days a week, and since the hospital partially paid, the staff got to eat tasty lunch for very cheap. That project has now come to an end, but it reflected how much this hospital valued the community.

Artist Takahama Hiroko works at a Shinto shrine in Kobe, western Japan, as a caretaker. In return for her services, she uses the shrine office to produce artwork. Although now she is able to make a living and continue her passion, there was a time when it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to keep pursuing art, but the bentos her mother made for her every day during that period kept her spirits up. And now, Hiroko is coloring the illustrated bento diary she kept back then.

The Nakamura family in Tokyo produces square, copper frying pans that are made especially for cooking excellent Japanese rolled omelets. The father is the boss, and under him, his 3 sons work, manually making the superb frying pans one by one. 2 of the sons are already married, and as such, they bring bento to work on most days, but on some special days, the mother of the family cooks lunch for everyone, and that's when they sit together and eat like the family they are.

Mt. Fuji is the highest mountain in Japan, and at its summit, there is a shrine. The man who cooks for the shrine priests 3 times a day is actually a total amateur. However, he does have a lot of experience as a mountaineer, and that's what landed him the job. And it's okay that he's not the most experienced chef, because he is armed with recipes written by his beloved wife. Plus, if even that is not enough, he can always call her to ask for emergency cooking advice!

We visit Chiba, the prefecture that neighbors Tokyo, to go to one of Japan's largest mushroom farms. At the farm, they grow massive amounts of mushrooms but surprisingly, each mushroom is harvested by hand. To feed their hard-working employees, the farm renovated what was formerly the home economics room of a school to set up their very own bento kitchen. At the kitchen, they cook up delicious dishes that feature a whole lot of mushrooms, every day!

The Shinshu Buddhist Otani-ha Sect Namba Betsuin Temple in Osaka Prefecture, western Japan, has been loved by the local people since it was founded in 1595. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the local people had been unable to go to their beloved temple during spring this year, but in summer, the temple decided to hold memorial services for the local people during the Obon Festival, a period when Japanese people honor the spirits of their ancestors. Behind the scenes, one of the senior monks cooks up a filling vegetable curry so that the hard-chanting monks can charge up on energy!