Only in Japan. Is it real?

Doesn't that picture of sushi look yummy?  Drool on all you want because you can't eat it.  Why?  Because it's fake.  Yep, plastic to the core.

Japan is known for its fake food....usually seen in the showcase window of a restaurant.  Of course, the displays of fake food are intended to attract customers, advertise menus and whet appetites. In our case, they will likely serve as things we can point to indicate to our server what it is we want to eat since we can neither read nor speak Japanese :-)

For some inextricable reason, I love the fake food.  To me, it's art - realism in 3D.  

There is a history to how all this got started in Japan.  Turns out what has become a custom was born from contact with the West.

As told in an article from http://www.japanwelcomesyou.com/,

"In the Meiji era at the end of the 19th century, Japanese restaurant-goers were frequently confounded by the strange new Western cuisines flooding into the country. Even with Japanese translations of menu items, most guests had no idea what they were ordering. To help, many restaurants took the expensive and space-consuming means of preparing samples for their customers to peruse. To cut costs, some restaurants provided elaborate drawings or photos. But these one-dimensional presentations did not pique many appetites. The Meiji era slowly gave way to Taisho and then to Showa with little change.

Enter an entrepreneur from Gifu. Takizo Iwasaki was a young man bent on making an impact in the business world. By 1926 -- the first year of Showa -- Iwasaki had yet to find his niche. So he left Gifu for Osaka in search of his fortune.

Life was hard for Iwasaki in Osaka as well until one day -- perhaps while eating a rice omelet in a crowded lunch shop -- something clicked in his imagination. He remembered the wax models of the human body on display at most Japanese apothecaries and the wax fruit and vegetables used in school nutrition classes and thought: "Why not!"

Iwasaki hurried back to his cramped apartment and -- after days of trial and error -- finally perfected a wax model of a rice omelet. Other models followed. Then he loaded them on his bicycle to see if any shops would buy his replica food. To his joy, they all did.

Even among imitators, success leads to imitation, and Iwasaki soon had competitors across Japan. Yet the company he founded in his Osaka apartment -- Iwasaki Be-I -- remains the largest purveyor of replica food to this day.

Wax eventually gave way to high quality plastic."

.....and Japan has not been the same since.  But let's be real, there's plastic food being made all around the world but I think few people would dispute the fact that the Japanese have taken it to a whole different level.  I read somewhere that there are even competitions to find the *best* fake.  I've seen replicas that are so realistic that if not for the plastic sheen on them, you wouldn't know the stuff was fake.

Apparently, pieces that are  displayed in a restaurant's showcase window are often exact copies of the restaurant's entire menu.  The fake food is meticulously hand modeled after the real thing and so it's not cheap to make.  Duplicating a restaurant’s entire menu could cost anywhere from hundreds of thousands of yen to more than a million.  So, not surprisingly, there is an entire industry that makes its money making fake food which is sold throughout Japan.  In Tokyo, there is a district called Kappabashi where there is a concentration of establishments that sell supplies to restaurants and it's where you can go to buy fake food.

I have to go to Kappabashi to pick up a fake piece or two that I will display as artwork in my kitchen. Now if I can only convince my brother that going to Kappabashi is a good thing!