Kono makes it look deceptively easy. “Place it in your hands and pull out the edges like this,” she says. “Then roll the remaining wax into a ball to make a small lettuce. Place it onto your hand and, starting from the back, fold the bigger leaf towards the middle. Using both hands, gently form a sphere. And there you have it.”
She then drips a yellowy liquid wax from a paper cup into the hot water. Within seconds, it forms a solid coating, in which she encases a “cooked prawn” to produce a flawless piece of tempura. It really does look good enough to eat.
A godsend to foreign tourists who, faced with a Japanese-language menu, can simply point and order, shokuhin sanpuru (food samples) have been tempting diners into Japan’s restaurants for almost a century. (...)
Gujo Hachiman, a picturesque town tucked in the mountains more than three hours west of Tokyo, lays claim to being the home of a replica food industry now worth an estimated $90m.
It is said that the father of replica food, Takizo Iwasaki, was inspired by the drops of candle wax that formed on the tatami-mat floor at the home he shared with his wife, Suzu, in Osaka, according to his biography, Flowers of Wax.
After months of perfecting his technique, Iwasaki made Suzu a fake omelette, garnished with tomato sauce, that she initially failed to distinguish from the real thing.
While some artisans had already started making rudimentary food models in the 1920s, Iwasaki pioneered a production method that combined accuracy with volume, and opened a workshop in his hometown of Gujo Hachiman.
His omelette appeared at a department store in Osaka in 1932, and an industry was born.
The more prosaic theory is that the replica food boom grew out of demand by restaurants for models that re-created the increasingly eclectic range of Japanese and foreign dishes that appeared on menus in the postwar period.
“Eating out could be a challenge for some people in those days, so restaurateurs saw display models as a way of putting customers at ease,” says Katsuji Kaneyama, president of Sanpuru Kobo (Sample Kobo), one of several replica food firms in Gujo Hachiman, whose products account for about two-thirds of the domestic market. (...)
“The trick is in striking a balance between realism and aestheticism – the model that looks the most delicious isn’t necessarily the most realistic,” says Kaneyama, whose 10 full-time artists produce as many as 130,000 samples a year, made from durable PVC rather than wax.
by Justin McCurry, The Guardian | Read more:
Video: The Guardian
