Japanese Packed lunch

Happy New Year everyone.

Alex started school last week and I was so glad because he was driving me bonkers by asking me when he could go back to school, 20 times a day (nearly every 30 minutes), for 3 weeks.

It has been 3 months since I have officially started packing lunch for Alex.
It was great at first.
Lots of frozen bite size lunch food in Tokyo in the freezer section; all you have to do is nuke 'em and pack 'em. They even have frozen blanched spinach nicely tucked in a 1 x 1 plastic nukable container.

All you have to do is take the package out of the freezer, cut one container off (about 8 containers connected loosely in 1 package), add some salt or soy sauce and throw it in the microwave.

They sell cute lunch boxes too (Alex has "Thomas" and "Cars", of course) and all I have to do is figure out how to configure these various containers with various prepared food in them in the box so they fit, and throw in a rice ball or two (easier to make than sandwiches, actually).
Alex was just so excited getting food in a box that he was content with it for 2 months.

Then he started comparing his lunch to his classmates'.
He noticed that others were far more elaborate than his:

• He noticed that sausages weren't merely boiled, they were somehow morphed into octopuses or flowers.
• Rice balls weren't just rice flavored with a sprinkle of salt carelessly squashed together in the box. They were Elmos, cookie monsters, soccer balls and bunnies.
• There were smiling eggs and Pokemon cheese.
• Koala meatballs and star sandwiches.

Packing lunch is a competitive sports here.

By the second year of packing, most moms (and I stress moms here, since in this society, these things HAVE to be made by moms, no one else) make it into an art form and the respective children open their lunch boxes proudly in the hopes of attaining the highly coveted "best lunch box owner" status.

You see the idea is, the better the lunch box content, the more that child is cherished and loved by his/her mom.
Under this guideline, Alex was literally an orphan.

And so, to keep within the spirit of his classmates and their ever so creative moms, Alex started to demand "spider webs", "froggies", "backyardigans" on his lunch and I started to oblige.

I don't want him to grow up and think 20 years later that he has some obscure issues because I didn't pack him good looking lunch.

I have spent well over $30 investing in silly lunch making gadgets like Nori punchers (punches a face into a nori), animal rice shapers (shapes the riceballs into elephants, fish and bears), swordfish toothpick (a tiny blue plastic swordfish in which it's "sword" part acts as a toothpick - I line up edamame on this; alex thinks it's hilarious), Ariel partitions (wax paper partitions with Ariel printed on it - he's in love with her right now), Winnie the Pooh Nori (Nori pre-cut into Pooh) etc and these stuff are taking up an entire cupboard.

Think I'm losing my mind?
This is what I am up against.

and this

and this

and these are just the tip of the iceberg.

I thought I didn't have to deal with this crap if I had Alex in an American school.
Apparently, blond kids at his school get a pass even if their lunch is just a jelly sandwich and a banana (low status) that comes directly out of a bag (even lower status).

However, there are different expectations for kids with Asian moms and an American style laissez-faire packed lunch may ostracize the child from classroom society.

"Mommy, I was the only one who didn't have a face for lunch (meaning a face somehow designed on a rice ball or sandwich or boiled egg or whatever). Everybody was talking about their faces and playing with them!! I didn't have a face....nobody played with me"

I am having such a hard time taking this seriously.

One of our neighbors, who has 3 school aged kids besides her preschooler told me she wakes up at 5am every weekday to pack lunch. She also packs snacks, makes breakfast, checks the kids' belongings and drives the kids to 2 different schools before having to comeback home.
However if she didn't have to pack lunch, she could get away with waking up at 6:30.
She's been doing this for 12 years. She has an MBA from an Ivy League. You'd think she'd have all the logistics figure out by now to maximize efficiency and shorten labor time. Nope, even she - who did operational management - cannot escape the mundane labor intensive work of packing a Japanese lunch.

I can't live like this!