I'm from Los Angeles, where car culture reigns supreme. I suppose the equivalent would be eating in the car versus sitting alone in a restaurant or at your desk at work.
No, the equivalent is eating your meal in the toilet.
I'm from the US and always have had a car but since highschool have spent any "social time" like lunch locked in a toliet stall because I am terrified of people and people don't seem to like me either.
I also eat in my car but first need to drive to a secluded spot.
I've eaten in a car before but I think the major difference from a toilet meal is that eating in a car is actually comfortable (I can recline, play music, etc) and that you can still be seen. Whereas the purpose of a toilet meal seems to be mainly to hide and preserve your social image.
There's a solitary joy to a nice car meal. I'm not afraid of people, but I like the privacy of having a meal in my own car versus a fast food restaurant's dining room (doubly so since COVID).
That explains why my former employee had signs of a crossed through Bento in their bathrooms (here in Tokyo). The sign also said to refrain from napping or using your phone in the restroom. How exactly they found out what people do in the stalls remains a mystery.
According to my former coworkers, hiding away in bathrooms is endemic in ブラック companies. The company I worked for was a game company, so they also had nap rooms for the inevitable crunch time.
If you are looking for a job in Tokyo, watch out for nap rooms and bathroom signs that says no food.
TIL that nail clipping in public is strongly avoided in western worlds. The culture looks funny as a Japanese. (just to be sure, take coffee into toilet is weird)
There is this odd phenomenon where social phenomena first identified in Japan are assumed to be characteristically or exclusively Japanese, to an extent that I don't see happen for other countries. I don't think eating meals in toilet stalls is particularly uncommon in the west among people who are bullied or stigmatized. Probably not as common as in Japan, as Japan has more of a "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down" culture, but not rare.
To be honest, I don't really feel like "toilet meal" is a distinct enough concept to have a Wikipedia page; I don't think there's much point in distinguishing between "toilet meal", "car meal", "under the stairs in a quiet corridor meal" &c
The wikipedia makes this seem like a japan-only phenomenon, but the scene in Mean Girls [1] makes me wonder how often it happens in other countries like the US [2] [3]
