First production and sales business shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizo, one of the three first practitioners of this craft. A native of Gujo Hachiman, a city in central Gifu Prefecture, he developed a passion for wax as a child. Legend has it that the idea of creating food replicas came to him after he saw a candle melting in cold water and its droplets hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy percent of the replica food products sold in Japan. As a partner of the Japan House exhibition, the conglomerate provided the exhibition with “The Holiday Omelette,” a reproduction of the original work. Iwasaki achieved the eggs' crinkly texture “through repeated trial and error,” as the accompanying text explains, pouring agar jelly over a real omelet his wife had just made. The replica sits on a gold-rimmed plate in the shape of a glittering crescent moon smeared with ketchup.
“Looks delicious!” focuses on the period beginning in the twenties, when Western food began to penetrate Japan and restaurateurs – especially in Tokyo department stores – used cues to effectively communicate to potential customers exactly what “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also became associated with kissaten— cozy, smoky cafes with European decor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have a retro, Showa period, 1950s and 60s vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat rough in that era (for example, they could not be tilted to prevent the wax from softening and starting to sag in the sun), their popularity did not suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting passable ribeye to the United States to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it's no surprise that exhibition organizers have found a clever way to highlight the variety of food replicas while promoting tourism. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisine – dishes from each of the country's forty-seven prefectures. Eat Kiritanpo nabe from the Akita Mountains, a hot pot dish with rice puree wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, along with fish and bracken. Ohriansoup of the Ainu people, living mainly in Hokkaido. I couldn't stop thinking about the delicious likeness Sudati-somen– Wheat flour noodles in chicken broth, garnished with light green citrus fruits grown in Tokushima.
Shokuhin sampuru are known to be useful for non-Japanese speaking visitors to Japan. But the replica kibinago— silverstriped herring eaten like sashimi near the warm waters of southern Japan — served as a reminder that Japanese cuisine varies so much by region that the Japanese, too, may need visual assistance. Sakamoto, a food writer, told me that on a recent trip to Kanazawa, she relied on replica food to get a sense of the texture and size of the caviar. fugu no ko nukazukeA local dish made from puffer fish eggs fermented in rice bran. The nose, for its part, once used shokuhin sampuru to find out where the eastern Japanese habit of garnishing hot noodles with chopped white onions gave way to the western Japanese habit of green onions. “I walked from Tokyo to Kyoto—about five hundred kilometers in twenty-six days—sampling the food in every restaurant along the way,” he recalled in his lecture. “I discovered that in the famous resort area of Hakone, white and green onions coexist, so Hakone marks the border.”
Traditionally, shokuhin sampuru artisans specializing in Western, Chinese or Japanese cuisine. These divisions no longer apply, but some items are thought to be more difficult to visualize than others. At Japan House, Wright paused in front of a video detailing the creation of food replicas. On the screen, a man draws stripes on a mother-of-pearl shrimp. “You expect automated conveyor belts or robotic arms or whatever, but that’s not the case,” Wright said. “It’s completely analog, from start to finish.” It can be assumed that modern technologies threaten shokuhin sampurubut proponents say that in three dimensions they convey nuances of proportion and texture that QR codes and Yelp reviews can't convey. Craig Maud, an American writer and photographer, author of the book “Kissa by Kissa” about visiting coffee shops in rural Japan, compared the assessment process shokuhin sampuru to scroll. “You don't look at each dish individually, you evaluate them collectively, in the blink of an eye,” he said. “It’s like an Instagram grid.”
