Tasty, healthy and wasting nothing; traditional Japanese cuisine served on a hakozen table distills many of the country's dying cultures.

A hakozen is a wooden box used as a portable table for an individual and also as a case to hold tableware; it's name derives from the Japanese words hako, meaning "box," and zen, meaning "meal."

The boxes were in widespread use in Japan from the Edo Period (1603-1867) until around 1930. Now, decades after dining tables effectively took over from them, the numerous virtues of this box-table cuisine are being revived as a way to maintain local food cultures.