I went to the largest Ekiben tournament in Japan

A dispatch from the Keio Department Store's 60th annual ekiben tournament, the world championships of train station boxed lunches.

TOKYO, JAPAN — Every year there’s a moment when my finger hovers dangerously close to the button that buys flights to attend the Keio Department’s annual ekiben tournament in Tokyo, Japan.

Ekiben are themed boxed lunches featuring regional cuisines and cultures sold around Japanese train stations. And the tournament, which marks its 60th anniversary this year, is the only place where you can try more than 300 different kinds from all over the country.

Even the tournament is just a small corner of the ekiben universe. There are an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 different kinds of ekiben available somewhere along the tracks in Japan every day, an ever-changing menu of themed, limited-run lunch boxes that encompass major food traditions from every region. The Keio tournament is just one of several annual department store festivals or tournaments where hopeful ekiben creators compete to be added to the official roster. There are ekiben manga, anime, rankings, commentators, judges and bloggers. One ekiben enthusiast has created an online museum that documents more than 9,000 different kinds of ekiben sold throughout history.

Some of these train bentos are more than a century old. Others are edible versions of local legends, traditions and histories. There are futuristic self-heating marvels and ancient meals packaged in banana leaves, bamboo and wood. A few come in collectible ceramics thrown by practitioners from each of Japan’s major pottery schools. One plays a folk song when you open it. My favorite at the moment is a ham sandwich presented as if it’s a Mark Rothko painting.

My impression is that to most Japanese people, being really into ekiben is like being into train stamps or collecting anime figures - a fun diversion, not worth serious attention, unless you are weird and/or a nerd.

But for me, discovering ekiben was like learning that Pokemon was real. But instead of Pokemon that you must journey across the land to catch, it’s thousands of storied lunchboxes, each with tantalizingly inaccessible lore that reveal aspects of Japanese culture, history, geography, identity and environment.

Each ekiben has a story to tell - and you have to look for it. And what you find is a massive flowering of food cultures and regional identities that rejects the stereotypes of conformity and collectivism that always seem to accompany depictions of Asia and Japan. Judging by the ekiben, Japan is a nation of rugged mavericks so individualistic that they cannot stand to eat the same thickness of noodle as the prefecture next door; who will not rest until every town and region and neighborhood has a distinct identity and flavor.