Episode 218: Clotheshorse in Japan: Fake Food (Shokuhin Sampuru), Parfaits, and Pudding

Welcome to Clotheshorse, the podcast that is very open about its love of fake fruit.

I’m your host, Amanda and this is episode 218, recorded in Nagasaki, Japan.

And by the way, can I just say how amazing it is to be like “hey everyone, I love fake fruit and here’s a whole wall made of thrifted fake fruit” and you’re all supportive and excited about it? I truly have met my people and I’m super happy about that.

I’ve been in Japan now for almost three weeks and I’m flying home in 8 days.  And while I will miss all of the cool stuff I’m seeing here and those conbini egg salad sandwiches, I will also be super excited about seeing Dustin and the cats again, sleeping in my own bed, and no longer living out of my suitcase.

So what have I done since the last time we talked?

• I took another three train trip  to Takayama, a beautiful town in the mountains that I really want to visit again with Dustin.  The purpose of this trip was to visit a pair of Showa/Retro museums that were filled with toys, games, and other ephemera of the Showa era, a period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) from December 25, 1926, until his death on January 7, 1989. That’s a long span, right? There was so much cool stuff to see and I promise I will make a reel of that trip when I have a chance.
• On this trip I’m going further south into Japan than I have ever been before, starting with Beppu, a small resort town on the southern Japanese island Kyushu.  It’s located between Beppu Bay and volcanic mountains and it’s home to more than 2,000 onsen (hot springs).  So yeah, it’s beautiful and moody and the air smelled really good. And the hotel we stayed in had the best breakfast, including local specialties like bamboo charcoal curry and this incredible chicken and rice dish.  I also had this pumpkin custard (savory, not sweet) that I will be thinking about for a long time.
• I don’t believe in bucket lists, but while I was in Beppu I visited a place that has been on my mental bucket list of things I wanted to do someday:  visit Sanrio Harmonyland, an outdoor Sanrio theme park high up in the mountains.  There’s actually a huge swath of the park that’s just for hiking and picnicking.  Of course, there were also some cute rides (and none of them are scary, because, you know, it’s a park for children).  I’m not going to lie: I kinda teared up during one of the performances there because it was just so exciting to see how…well, excited everyone was!
• Back in Beppu, Christine and I went to an “American-themed” restaurant, where we had massive Japanese style parfaits.  Mine included a custard pudding that was cooked over the steam vents from the onsen! And throughout the town, there were vending machines where you could buy a little cup of this pudding! The train station had a little onsen for your hands, where you could just soak your hands and feel some good vibes.  It was very nice.

Most outings I take here in Japan seem to involve three trains.  Seriously, even if I’m in the middle of the city, I’ll pick a museum that requires a walk to one train, plus two more transfers. And when I’m venturing out to a small town in the mountains (which I’ve been doing a lot lately), it’s a real testament to how amazing the train system is here.  The further from the city I get (and the steeper the mountain climb will be), the shorter the trains get, usually just 1 or 2 cars.

Last week I took one of those epic journeys into the mountains to Gujo Hachiman, a small river town in Gifu prefecture.  To be fair, Gujo Hachiman, with a population of about 40,000 is a bustling metropolis compared to the town I grew up in (the place where we lived the longest).  I discovered today that York Haven, PA–where we lived from 4th grade until I was in high school) has a population of 690 people.  And unlike York Haven, Gujo Hachiman was founded in the 1600s after the construction of Hachiman Castle.

Gujo Hachiman is known for several great things:

• Its super high quality drinking water (it really is quite refreshing)
• Its 32-night summer dance festival that began almost 400 years ago.
• And (insert imaginary drumroll here), it is the source of many of the food replicas made and displayed here in Japan.

Food replicas–called shokuhin sampuru or just sampuru (“samples”)–are found at just about every restaurant here in Japan, no matter the price, the type of cuisine, or the target audience. It is very normal to walk by a restaurant and see a full window, or even a glass case out on the street, showing the array of foods available on the menu, often with pricing and names.  And we’re talking entrees, side dishes, and even desserts.  Heck, it’s not abnormal to even see sampuru in the form of a cup of coffee or tea.  Last week I saw a food replica of iced coffee–many restaurants here serve iced coffee in a copper mug, like you might get with a moscow mule.  And the replica iced coffee had the most amazing, hyper realistic ice cubes.  The thing about sampuru is that sometimes it just looks so real, but even when it doesn’t, it still looks pretty delicious? And the detail is incredible.  Food replicas are often made of wax and/or plastic, with an incredible amount of hand painting to add the details.. And every piece is made by hand, often specifically to match the exact description of the item on that specific restaurant’s menu, even using the same dishes and glassware that the restaurant uses. The restaurants send detailed photos of each dish to the replica workshop so that every detail can be exact. So essentially it can’t be mass produced because every piece will be different. Furthermore, the artisans making these foods also have to think about how color might be impacted by the light passing through the glass case.  

The sampuru can actually be a life saver when your japanese reading skills are low or non-existent.  I can read Japanese on a sixth grade level (after 8 years of studying, woof) and I find myself having to open the google translate app in a lot of restaurants.  Sampuru at least give you a chance to see the kind of food in the restaurant and get an idea of portion size, etc. So tourists generally find the food replicas pretty helpful.

But sampuru actually don’t exist for tourists.  The concept of restaurants showing samples of the food at the entrance dates back to the 1800s, when restaurant owners would put out a display of the actual food for customers to see.  Of course, that had some pretty obvious drawbacks: the food would spoil, it was generally a waste of food, and it would attract insects and animals.  As the day progressed, the sample food would become more and more disgusting. TBH I have seen this play out in the Starbucks display case, with those breakfast sandwiches looking more and more pitiful as the afternoon arrived.

But for these restaurant owners, it was essential that customers could see the food available for purchase. Why? Because even if they had printed menus, those menus certainly didn’t include photos of the food.  And even more certainly, they weren’t color photos of food. If a customer could not read, how could they know what to order?  These actually-real-food sampuru were a necessity. So they continued to display real food, and most likely enjoyed some fun encounters with rats, flies, and pigeons. I have no doubt that the massive crows here (called jungle crows) look back at the 1800s as time of feast and plenty, with all of those food samples for the taking). They are probably still talking about it with their grandchildren.

Well, nothing good lasts forever, and certainly the crows of Japan look back on the 1920s as a time when their lives changed a lot.  When they could no longer just grab some noodles from a restaurant display, and instead had to shift their focus to trash cans, dishes of cat food left in the alley for outdoor cats,  and soft-hearted humans.  And that’s because in the 1920s, making food replicas out of paraffin wax became a thing.

Let’s meet the hero of our story (but only if humans are telling the story, not in the crow version of the story):  Takizo Iwasaki  was born in Gujo Hachiman Japan on September 12, 1895. No doubt he grew up enjoying the high quality drinking water and the annual summer dance festival.

In the 1920s, department stores were becoming more popular in Japan, thanks to the ever growing train infrastructure here in Japan.  If you recall from the last episode, I told you that department stores, malls, grocery stores…really just shopping as a whole, tend to be clustered around train stations here.  And many rail companies straight up opened their own department stores. 

Department stores here are both similar to what we think of as a department store in the west, and also, much much different. The first floor is still where you find the cosmetic counters. The air is full of perfume. Each floor up contains different departments for clothing, home goods, luggage, etc.  There are often multiple restaurants and cafes.  Brands will have pop up shops.  There might be a limited special collab or shop on the top floor.  There might be an entire department of house plants and accessories. The stationary floor is always a personal favorite.  But the basement is where the real action is because it’s all about food.  There is a section of food gifts (all packaged up by the immaculate employees behind the counters), candies, baked goods, tea and coffee…and there’s also a massive section of take out food, from deli cases overflowing with seafood delicacies and noodles, to bento boxes comprised of regional specialities. Many department stores also have a straight up grocery store in the basement with fresh produce and standard staple items.

Wel, with the rise of the department stores in the early decades of the 1900s, the restaurants, cafes, and even gift food counters faced a problem: if they continued to put  real food samples of their offering on display (which they kinda had to do), they were wasting a lot of food and inviting pests into the store.  Not a good look for these new and exciting shopping meccas!

Candlemakers and other artisans were beginning to make fake versions of these foods using paraffin wax, but it wasn’t a super widespread practice yet.  Legend has it (and by “legend” I mean the Iwasaki Company website) that Takizo Iwasaki was watching candle wax drip on to the tatami mat in his living room when he had a lightbulb moment: HE should try to make fake food out of wax!  

He got to work trying to make a replica of the rice omelette his wife cooked just about every day.  After months and months of perfecting the process and details, he finally got it right.

According to his biography Flowers of Wax, he exclaimed,”Suzu, I did it.”

And she said,”Oh, I can’t tell which one is real…” Moreover, both agreed that his replica actually looked BETTER than the real thing.

Iwasaki developed a production process that would make creating these food replicas a lot more efficient, so that the use of sampuru could be scalable and widely available. It was all about finding the balance between accuracy (because in the world of sampuru, details really matter) and volume.  And when you think about it, that’s a real challenge because all of these items are hand made and then hand painted.  Iwasaki could now open a workshop in his hometown of Gujo Hachiman. His first omelette was displayed at a department store in Osaka in 1932…and an entire industry was born!

After World War II, demand for food replicas increased as more restaurants began to introduce dishes that were a combination of Western and Japanese food. In fact, things like hamburgers, french fries, pizza, and pasta became hyper trendy in Japan in the middle of the last century. I never cease to be amazed by how many pasta restaurants are here! I’ve seen frozen pizza at 7-11, major hamburger chains like Mos Burger, and of course, American-influenced “family restaurant” chains like Denny’s and Royal Host.  Post World War II, when these items were just the hot new thing, a replica made it easier to understand what the new food was.  

Takizo Iwasaki is considered the grandfather of sampuru here in Japan because he was the first person to turn it into a large scale industry.  But obviously, over the years, other companies emerged and grew to meet the ever-increasing demand for food replicas.  Even in Iwasaki’s hometown, there is another sample company, Sampuru Kobo. 

In the 1970s and 80s, more and more of the food replica industry shifted from wax to plastic and resin. Why? Because unfortunately wax just wasn’t that sturdy. It melted in heat, whether that heat was from the sun or the lights inside a glass case. The colors faded from the combination of light and time.  And as the wax softened with time, it attracted dust that could not be removed.  Every once in a while, I have visited a restaurant here that is still using old wax sampuru and you can definitely see a difference.  It looks kinda dusty and dirty.  The colors are a little off.  The detail isn’t completely there.  Everything just feels less vibrant and clean.

I don’t love plastic, but I also see how the replica food is a lot less wasteful than using real food.  After all, these food replicas are intended to be used for years and years.  And no one is cooking and then tossing out a plate of food every single day or even multiple times a day.  So if you’re going to have a bunch of food displayed outside your restaurant, I guess it makes sense to use the plastic stuff.

The process for making this food sounds deceptively simple: resin/plastic is poured into molds, individual pieces like garnish are shaped separately, and each piece is hand painted before being glued together and placed in the serving dish.  But it’s so much more than that: it’s an art form.  It requires a lot of training and talent to do it well.  It’s all about the details, finesse, and an understanding of color. And artisans have to find the balance between realism and the appearance of deliciousness…because I think we can all agree that sometimes the most delicious meals don’t look delicious?

So last week, Christine of Lady Hogg Vintage and I took the three-trains-necessary trip up to Gujo Hachiman to learn more about making sampuru.

We decided to check out Sample Village Iwasaki, because obviously we have to go to the original innovator of fake food.  And yes, that original (or, allegedly original fake omelette was on display for all to see, along with a lot of other cool  fake food including cakes, pasta, parfaits, some really incredibly impressive fried chicken, sandwiches, basically all of the things.

For a reasonable fee, you can choose to make a wide array of foods in the studio.  I opted for a parfait (which was incredibly easy to make) and Christine chose some sushi.

The studio itself is a big but cozy open space, filled with tables that each have a large warm water bath. The warm water bath houses containers of different colors of melted wax.
Along the edges of the room are stations with hot knives (for slicing things), glue guns, and bins of little artificial garnishes like sprinkles, crushed nuts, and tiny pieces of fruit.

Making a fake parfait is remarkably easy and very gratifying.  You start by pouring a splash of fake syrup into the bottom of the glass.  I was offered a variety of “flavors,” and I opted for strawberry.  Next you add ice cream via a huge caulk gun filled with faux soft serve ice cream. Not to be confused with the slightly smaller caulk gun filled with faux whipped cream.  You add layers of corn flakes, fruit, more syrup, before topping it with more fake ice cream.  Lastly, you garnish with the tiniest fake fruit, sprinkles, and a wafer cookie.  Easy, right?

Christine’s sushi was a whole other ball of wax (no pun intended) but then again, it was made of wax.

The rice and salmon were easy: just pour the wax into the molds and allow them to cool. The molds were silicone, so it was relatively simple to get the cooled wax out of the mold.  When the salmon cooled, Christine hand painted the edges and the center with a darker shade of pink to get the look of real fish.  And you know what? It took a while!  

But the real challenge was the pickled ginger! For that, the instructor showed Christine how to ladle the hot wax into the warm water in the shape of the circle.  Next she had to use her fingers to mold it into the thin slices of ginger.  Once again, this took time and a level of finesse.  Christine also made a roll, so she got to use the hot knife to heat up the wax rice so that she could wrap the fake seaweed around it. It was all kind of amazing to watch.  

At a nearby table, a family was making tempura shrimp.  After pouring the shrimp into the mold, they were busy making the tempura coating by shaping bits of breading-colored wax into little flakes in the warm water bath.  It was so cool! 

If anything, my visit to Sample Village Iwasaki actually made me want to make MORE fake food.  There is a store in the Tokyo Skytree Mall that is run by another fake food company, Ganso Food Sample Company.  They sell kits for making just about every fake food you can imagine.  I’m thinking about picking up some kits for Dustin, Dylan, and I to work on at Christmas.  We don’t do a very traditional Christmas: we make either a big feast of gyoza or hot pot, we also usually have a big midday cheese platter, and we hang out, make crafts, and watch movies. So this year we might be making fake food!

Okay, well that’s all I have for this week. I’ll be heading back to Pennsylvania next week, but I may release one more episode about Japan when I return. So keep your eyes out for that! Or maybe I’ll get extra ambitious and do one more before I leave.