弁当箱 Unexpected Railway Souvenirs

Hines · June 14, 2025, 5:40am

Have you ended up with a really unexpected souvenir on a trip?

We found these lunch containers first at a museum lunchroom and then a railway station kiosk. They are surprisingly sturdy, well detailed and look like they will fit as a load on a G-scale flat car.

The brown container blurb roughly translated as, “There is a railway network of about 8,000 kilometres and about 140 freight stations throughout the country. The number of freight trains running per day is about 400. The total mileage is 190,000 km, which is about 5 times around the earth.”

The green container translation states, “Railway container transport 50th anniversary commemorative container. In 2009 (Heisei 21), to commemorate the 50th anniversary of railway container transportation, a specially painted 19D type container based on the yellow-green No. 6 used on the JNR was made for a limited number of 50 pieces. Even today, it is used on routes across the country, and it is popular among fans and known as the “yellow-green container of happiness”

Also, please note… The cat is not to scale.

John_Wilda · June 14, 2025, 9:23am

Those are really cool! What a fun thing to find!

Cliff_Jennings · June 14, 2025, 7:24pm

Yeah, nice! I just checked, and yep, you can buy the boxes empty on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Cargo-Container-Empty-Official-Design/dp/B0DRPP67JB

You unpacked from your big Japan trip? And will we be seeing train vids?

Hines · June 15, 2025, 1:33am

What a great find Cliff! If we count the cost of our airfare, the Amazon price looks like a fantastic bargain. (I think we got two of these containers, filled with lunch for the price of the empty one on Amazon.)

Other surprise finds were the Shinkansen bento boxes, water bottles and pencil cases found along the way. This pencil case came with chocolate and instead of being embossed, a fridge magnet was attached to the outside.

BTW, how’s your sushi train coming along?

Cliff_Jennings · June 15, 2025, 11:55am

Fun stuff, Bill! How do the bento boxes work? [edit: wow, some of them are self-heating with a chemical heater pouch thing, very cool].

Sushi train is ready to go, I’ll pull it out when our granddaughters are here in around 3 weeks.

Hines · June 15, 2025, 11:01pm

We generally chose our bento boxes randomly at the train station ready-to-go, so we’re not too worried about cooling them down or heating them up.

As for deciding what bento to get, some railway shops display fake food, called shokuhin sampuru which gave us a better impression of what was in the bento boxes than what we could decipher from photos.

As for the fake food, each shokuhin sampuru dish is meticulously crafted by hand, primarily using PVC and resin. The process involves creating molds, casting the plastic, and then meticulously painting and detailing each piece to achieve a highly realistic appearance. We found there were shops where you could buy fake food for personal use at home as well.

As for the Bento Boxes; as much as we could decipher and know what we were getting, there was always a little surprise taste to experience.

Thanks to the plethora of 7-11, Lawsons and Family Marts, we got quite addicted to Onigiri (triangular shaped rice balls with fillings such as tuna and salmon) as they were cheap, easy to at, filling, easy to throw in the rucksack and transport. Onigiri were especially handy for our expedition to EXPO 2025 as food there was quite expensive and the queues were so very long.