Episodes
Sunday Feb 12, 2012
Episode 72: Yamato Bento
Sunday Feb 12, 2012
Sunday Feb 12, 2012
What we have here is a recycled book cover. It began life as a bento box: a box with food in it that is ubiquitous in Japan. You can find them virtually everywhere. I ripped mine apart (after eating the tiny bits of meat, chicken, salmon, vegetables, and massive amount of rice that comes with it), made sure it was clean, then turned it into a book cover. I liked the design that flows from the back to the front - a sort of Japanesey pattern - and the front has a nice strong diagonal under kanji. Everyone who has lived in Japan longer than a month laughed when they saw this book because they all know it is the lid from a bento box.
I used the Yamato Toji binding - butterfly by Smith - and B5 size paper so the book is about B6. And blank. I sewed the text block together, then glued down the first and last pages as endpapers. The inside is, therefore, all white paper - like rice? If I had thought ahead a little bit, I would have used a more thematic paper for the endpapers.
The kanji is maku-no-uchi (幕の内) which is two things: the highest ranking in sumo and a type of bento. I'm going with the type of bento here since it's a pretty slim book. It's 160 pages (10 signatures of four sheets each) and, surprisingly, didn't take too long to make. The Yamato Toji is a pretty quick little binding and gluing on the endpapers wasn't time consuming either.
And now for something really completely different: The B-52's Private Idaho from YouTube. For your entertainment pleasure only. Please don't try this at home.
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