There will be exhibits that focus on the day-to-day communication that is born out of making and eating bento. One such exhibit is《Bento of Ayumi shokudo – bento made by Ayumi’s kitchen》. In this project, readers sent in requests for bentos they wanted to make for a special someone; Ayumi Ooshio then devised a recipe and made the bento, Taro Hirano photographed it, then the recipe and bento box were delivered to the reader. Another work is《Hiruke – lunch time》by Satoru Abe, a collection of photographs that capture people quietly enjoying their bentos. The work invites viewers to contemplate the relationships between those eating the bentos and those who prepared them.

There are also artworks that allow visitors to reflect upon how they themselves are connected to the world around them, through observing the communication mediated by bento.
Toru Koyamada will be presenting 《Daddy Bento》, an archive of his family’s everyday bento-making process. His daughter, a primary schooler, writes instructions for a bento for her younger brother who goes to nursery school; Koyamada, their father, then makes the bento accordingly. The themes written on the instructions – “Eruption of Mt. Sakurajima” or “Meandering river with ox-bow lake” – might sometimes be inspired by bedtime reading, sometimes by a plant or insect found on a walk.
Yasuhiro Moriuchi is running a workshop in which junior high school students create documentary footage of themselves making bento, without receiving help from their parents. The project will be exhibited as a video work.

Among the works that focus on bento-born communication are participatory artworks that approach the bento from a different angle to how we normally think about it.
Marije Vogelzang, an “eating designer,” expresses the intangible, invisible aspects of bento – human connections, memories, hopes for the future and so on – welcoming visitors into her lively narratives.

Jun Kitazawa takes the bento as a tool with which to freely create a communication space out of a box and a piece of cloth (traditionally used to wrap the box). He is constructing a peculiar space titled 《FRAGMENTS PASSAGE – Osusowake Yokocho》 inside the museum, which focuses on the sharing mentality behind the bento culture. The work will be a laboratory-like environment where the visitors can examine, reflect upon and rediscover the bento for themselves.