With a cute-sounding name like ‘benjo-meshi’, you’d think the latest Japanese craze was a new Pokémon character. Sure, if he was shaped like a poo.
But no. Started by Japan’s socially-awkward high school and university students, adopted by the outcasts in the workforce and now embraced by the western world too, benjo-meshi is the practice of eating one’s lunch in a toilet cubicle in order to avoid ridicule for being a Nigel-no-friends. Literally translated as ‘toilet meal’, it’s a phenomenon that mostly occurs to people who struggle with developing friendships at schools, and while their more socially-skilled peers enjoy lunchtime in groups or at least with one other companion, the loners lock themselves up in the toilets and quietly finish their meal alone for fear of being bullied.
In Japan cases of benjo-meshi are so widespread across schools and the workforce that several institutions have taken to putting up posters in bathrooms to warn people that eating lunch in a toilet cubicle is a banned activity – right up there with graffiti and smoking. Other posters going around state that there are security cameras watching the students and that violators who are caught will be punished, though the latter claims are suspected to be the work of bullies playing a cruel prank. Which is just what the loners need.
And while it sounds like an extremely unhygienic way to eat your meal, not only do many of these kids have no other choice due to embarrassment of being outcasts, but grown adults in the western world have also recently taken to spending their lunchtimes this way, though completely voluntarily. And judging from the expressions on their faces here, there’s nothing miserable or embarrassing about it.
In fact, benjo-meshi seems all the less ‘weird’ when taking into account all the other things we do in toilets these days anyway. In a world where technology runs our lives and everyone is literally ‘plugged in’ every minute of the day, watching funny cats on YouTube, checking your Facebook, catching up on Twitter and playing Angry Birds while on the can is considered perfectly normal. Still, though the days of reading newspapers on the toilet are a thing of the past, we’re not so sure benjo-meshi will completely take over the world.
Source: RocketNews24 – http://bit.ly/1my1Rtu