Friday, December 29, 2006

Geeky Mothers

A mother of a 3 year old girl makes “character bento (lunchbox)” every morning, using tweezers, scissors, star-shaped and heart shaped cutters…She takes 1 or 2 hours and creates Dorae-mon, Kitty, Anpan-man, etc. from food material, takes a picture of the finished bento, and posts it on her blog. She gets 30 to 40 comments. Now, she has over 200 “character bento” buddies over the internet that she has never met. (from the Dec 28, 2006 Nikkei)

I couldn’t find her blog, but got 556,000 hits searching “kyara-ben” (short for character bento) on the net. Here’s a site called “Kyara-ben Club", with 74 members.

I’m not sure if kids brought up on kyara-ben become otaku.