The Life of a Chicken Curry

Today, I found a copy of the school’s newsletter on my desk. I usually ignore it but something caught my eye. “命のチキンカレー”.the life of a chicken curry. It was an article written by the principal recounting the essay of the same title, that he just read. The said essay was written by a 3rd year student in Aichi Ken who went to a poultry farm and personally experienced how to butcher a chicken. It seems that the said poultry farm is a regular “come-experience-it-yourself” and at first, they students were told the following “自分の手で鶏にナイフを入れ、チキンカレーを作る“or literally, “knifing the chicken with your own hands and make chicken curry”. Sounds so crude but fortunately for some of the students, it seems that they learned how to value life more because of the experience.
It all boiled down to appreciation of blessings and life particularly to their school or how they eat their school lunch. In Japanese schools, as much as possible, they have to eat everything served to them and not leave a morsel behind because it is wasteful. If you are interested in reading the essay, here it is. I would have translated it but it is too long for my translation powers. The principal went on to discuss about the meanings of the Japanese greetings before and after me亜ls。It was also my first time to hear about it thus I am sharing it here. This is a crude translation of his article.
“Do you know the meaning of “いただきます”(itadakimasu) and “御馳走様”? First, let me explain about “itadakimasu”. Everything that we eat, from the vegetables, animals, and fish were all living things. They also had their own lives. And so we are literally saying “we are about to partake of that life that they had”. The life that other living things had is now used to continue our own lives. And when we say “itadakimasu”, we are all thankful for those lives.

Now how about”御馳走様” （gochisosama）? This is said to give thanks to those who prepared the meal for us. The character [馳] has a [馬] horse in it. This suggests [走る] “to run”. The next character [走る], means “to run”. Even the “go” [御] is said to have the meaning of [走る]. Thus [走る] is used 3 times in this case. [御馳走] means “The person who prepared this meal has gone to different places to gather these ingredients and he did his best to make it delicious that I might be able to eat and enjoy my meal”.

In all my seven years here in Japan, it is only now that I understood the specific meaning behind this particular part of Japanese culture. There is no telling what I will learn again tomorrow.

(To those who can read kanji and are interested about the original essay by the student, click the link here 命のチキンカレー )