The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan. A partner in the Japan House show, the conglomerate had provided the exhibition its “Celebration Omelette,” a reproduction of a seminal piece. Iwasaki achieved the wrinkled texture of the eggs “through repeated trial and error,” an accompanying text explains, by pouring agar jelly over a real omelette his wife had just cooked. The replica sits on a gold-rimmed plate, a glossy half-moon smeared with ketchup.
“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.
Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima.
Shokuhin sampuru are famously helpful to non-Japanese-speaking visitors to Japan. But a replica of kibinago—silver-stripe herring, which are eaten as sashimi, in proximity to the warm waters of southern Japan—served as a reminder that Japanese cuisine varies so much by region that Japanese people, too, can require visual assistance. Sakamoto, the food writer, told me that, on a recent trip to Kanazawa, she relied on a food replica to apprehend the texture and size of the roe in fugu no ko nukazuke, a local dish of puffer-fish eggs fermented in rice bran. Nose, for his part, once used shokuhin sampuru to figure out where the eastern Japanese habit of garnishing hot noodle dishes with chopped white onions gave way to the western Japanese preference for green ones. “I walked from Tokyo to Kyoto—about five hundred kilometres over twenty-six days—examining food samples at each restaurant along the way,” he recalled in his lecture. “I found that, in the famous resort area of Hakone, white and green onions coexist, so Hakone marks the boundary.”
Traditionally, shokuhin sampuru artisans specialized in Western, Chinese, or Japanese cuisine. Those divisions no longer hold, but some items are considered more difficult to render faithfully than others. At Japan House, Wright paused in front of a video detailing the creation of food replicas. On the screen, a man spray-painted stripes onto a pearlescent prawn. “You expect automated conveyor belts or robot arms or whatever, but it’s not,” Wright said. “It’s completely analog, from beginning to end.” One might assume that modern technologies are threatening shokuhin sampuru, but adepts contend that, in three dimensions, they convey nuances of proportion and texture that QR codes and Yelp reviews cannot. Craig Mod, an American writer and photographer and the author of “Kissa by Kissa,” a book about visiting coffeehouses in the Japanese countryside, likened the process of assessing shokuhin sampuru to scrolling. “You’re not looking at each dish individually, you’re assessing them collectively, at a blink,” he said. “It’s like grid view on Instagram.”
