I'm very happy that JustBento is featured on the website of Redbook Magazine, in a slideshow titled Bento Lunches for Grownups. It has 9 bentos from this site (maybe you'll recognize a couple) that are all very easy to put together. It was a real pleasure to work with Ava on this, and I hope it will introduce even more people to the world of bento. (For those of you not in the U.S., Redbook is a major women's magazine, aimed primarily at American working women with families. Wikipedia on Redbook.) If you found us via Redbook, welcome! You'll find a lot of information here, from the very basics on up. We're just concluding a Bento for Beginners online course called Bento 101: Getting Into The Bento Habit (start here, and follow the links at the bottom) which may be helpful if you're curious about how it all works. I'd also like to belatedly say hi to everyone who came over from LifeHacker. Hi guys! Bento really is a pretty good life hack. ^_^

This has to stop. I'm declaring the re-opening of bento season!

The results of the big Bento&co Contest have been announced - the grand prize winner is Huang, who gets to go to Kyoto in September! As I mentioned earlier, I was one of the judges for this contest, and it was a very difficult task indeed to come up with a top 50, let alone a top 20. Everyone was really pushing the envelope!

Here are some of my personal favorites that didn't make the finalist list (with one exception).

Another Japan Times article - about how bento lunch time is used as a teaching opportunity at Japanese kindergartens.

An essay from a new Japanese book really strikes a chord...