食堂(Cafeteria)

I like eating in the cafeteria. When I was a kid, eating in the cafeteria was a big deal. It was part of one's social identity and defined who one was, and it was borderline criminal to try to go to "the cool table" or where one wasn't welcome. If it wasn't clear during the course of the day and in the hallways at school whether one was uncool, it became abundantly clear during lunchtime where one stood in the social pecking order. I was one of the losers; I sat at the loser table. It consisted mainly of my fellow chess team members (yes, I was on the chess team) and honors class people; each of us wished we were cooler to be able to sit next to the popular kids but were never extended an invitation to the big table.

In the adult workplace, or at least every workplace I've ever been to, the cafeteria (usually a breakroom or nearby restaurants where people hung out) is not that rigid of a social construct that people can't join someone for lunch, but there are still cliques and defined groups of people eating lunch, and the barriers are less obvious and less strict but still existent. At my current workplace there is a group of native Japanese speakers who eat lunch together every day; they speak in native Japanese to the extent incomprehensible to me, thus forming an invisible barrier again. I actually enjoy everyone at work and don't think anyone's trying to obviously exclude or be exclusive, but it's just a reminder that human beings are by nature social animals who want to form groups and become a unit with others, and like me feel somewhat jaded when excluded from a group that they want so desperately to become.

The Shokudo has been a big part of my social life at post-law school employment centers. Going out to eat, talking to others while having to listen (food is a great listening device to stop your own talking and give someone else their attention) to break up the day and get the latest information on things, live in someone else's world for just a little bit. I've had birthday parties in the cafeteria (birthday cake like in the scene of the office), watched the World Cup in the breakroom (great bonding experience at my job in 2014) and witnessed horror (mass shooting live coverage in France, as well as other places), placed Chinese chess with colleagues, held informal meetings, basically the town hall of the workplace. I don't even have to be eating to go to the cafeteria, I just wander there sometimes to see if a member of the work family is there and to shoot the breeze (see previous entry) (Japanese:  暇潰し) for a while. Don't estimate the Shokudo: it has great value other than just getting one's daily lunch fix. 

Fantasize on, 

Robert Yan