Hiroshi Nohara haunts my web browser. For the past four weeks, I see the slightly unkempt visage of the father from Crayon Shin-chan staring back at me on YouTube or rendered as fan art on my X feed. Oftentimes, he’s buried under layers of Japanese, as the long-running character has especially found a home on video service Nico Nico.
He’s become a meme, thanks to Style of Hiroshi Nohara's LUNCH, the fall’s most confounding new show on Japanese TV. Devoid of all context it's as simple a premise as possible. A salaryman eats lunch and presents his inner monologue regarding it. It becomes stranger once you factor in that it’s a spin-off from a long-running kids cartoon about an obnoxious and perverted toddler, but weirder experiments in intellectual property exist.
Where Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH gets funky is the creeping sensation the show is looking back at us. TV shows in Japan where someone eats food and comments on its deliciousness abound, best captured by the long-running The Solitary Gourmet. Yet there’s something off about this one. The animation is stiff, bordering on Newgrounds. The shots of the food Nohara eats are real, but unmoving pictures approaching stock photos. Nohara’s actual eating experience is interspliced with animated metaphors meant to sum up the experience of the food — imagine him suddenly under the ocean to explain the fish-edge of Okinawan soba or placing himself in the role of an RPG protagonist as he attempts to properly flavor fried chicken.
Is it charmingly cheap…or does Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH satisfy a longing for winking web-leaning programming? The roll out of the show hints that it’s the latter. Besides being available on streaming services, episodes appear on Nico Nico, a site carrying the digital torch for a pre-2010s kind of internet, with the first episode being the first since the debut of Bocchi The Rock! To record over one million views. Which explains why so many clips shared beyond that site features Nico Nico’s distinct comments-flying-across-the-screen style.
The animation style recalls something like the Aughts Flash-animated hit Eagle Talon, an offbeat show that became a netizen favorite…and which Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH often feels indebted to. The opening sequence, meanwhile, has been embraced by the too-online thanks to how it looks like something made in animation software MikuMikuDance, which seems knowing (less intentional…a part where Nohara like transforms the world around him, which has turned into a meme based off of “domain expansion” from Jujutsu Kaisen).
The online draw of this show is interesting, but how does Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH stand on its own? Critically, while it nods to the online crowd, it never overindulges, and the core of it is Nohara’s midday eating drama. Separating this show from similar watch-a-man-chow-down fare is Nohara’s salaryman status, specifically his now-rare-bordering-on-fantastical status as the sole breadwinner for his family. Everyday, he has a different financial limitation — sometimes he can go over ¥1000 while other times he has a single ¥500 coin to buy a meal.
Where the show shines is in how it celebrates the very act of eating as a way to bolster one’s day. That’s the key ingredient to any show in this genre, and whereas The Solitary Gourmet relies on spoken word flights of fancy to convey this, Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH uses animation to get it across, and present it with a more gag-like quality. The humor goes all over the place, with the best installments featuring rapid-fire bits one after another, and weaker ones wearing out the joke quickly (see one lunch where Nohara goes to a hamburger restaurant, with the running bit of a waitress misinterpreting his love of food for an attraction to her growing thin quickly). Yet uniting it all is the sensation of how uplifting a great meal can be, with Nohara’s facial reaction in particular being funny and effective.
It’s that feeling that makes Style of Hiroshi Nohara’s LUNCH filling, especially as none of the restaurants featured appear to be real. Yet that doesn’t matter, because while the show eyeballs the online masses…it connects wider thanks to the simple pleasure of eating.
