golyplot wrote:Do Japanese schools not have dedicated spaces for eating? All the schools I've seen in the US had giant cafeteria rooms for that purpose. Come to think of it, I don't recall seeing anything like a cafeteria in Cardcaptor Sakura. But in the rare cases where they were shown eating, it was always outdoors scattered among the school grounds, not blocking the hallways like in the skit from Erin's Challenge.
From what I've managed to glean from anime and manga most Japanese schools do have cafeterias, but lunch in there isn't free, so a lot of students prefer to bring their own lunches from home, and going to sit in the cafeteria with your own food tends to be either prohibited or frowned upon. Students with their own lunches will generally eat it in their classrooms during winter or somewhere on the grounds when it's warmer (what's shown in the skit seems like a bit of a middle ground variant, a balcony walkway behind the classrooms). There's also the notorious phenomenon of students (and even some adults at their workplaces) who have no close friends developing a complex about being seen eating lunch all alone and ending up eating in restroom stalls.
