Alberto Pellegrini doesn’t speak or read Japanese, a deficit that threatened to leave the Italian tourist starving in a nation famous for its gastronomic delights.
Fortunately for the hungry honeymooner, restaurants across this food-obsessed nation — where English menus range from sparse to non-existent — often display their wares in the form of intricately made plastic replicas.
The sight of a giant hotdog slathered in condiments doesn’t faze the average Japanese restaurant goer, and these fake food parades are often so similar to the real thing that they almost dare potential customers to take a bite.
Photo: AFP
A sudsy-looking beer, perfectly glazed sushi and indestructible deep-fried pork cutlets, known as tonkatsu, are a common sight on the streets of neon-lit Tokyo and even the smallest towns.
“It can really help,” Pellegrini said as he and his new wife combed lunch venues in Tokyo’s upscale Ginza shopping district.
“I point at the food and I just say ‘I want this, I want that.’ It is easier because choosing from a list (in Japanese) is impossible.”
Photo: AFP
But that sumptuous-looking futomaki has less-than-tasty origins. “The original craftsman was working for doctors and making models for pathological studies, such as skin diseases and human organs, before he was asked to make food samples for a restaurant,” says Yasunobu Nose, a senior editor at the leading Nikkei business daily who authored a book about food models.
That turn of events in the early 1920s set off a food revolution in Japan where the idea spread rapidly as eating out soared in popularity and rural people flocked to the cities.
Unused to what city restaurants had to offer, the models gave country dwellers and locals alike a quick visual rundown of the chef’s specialties before stepping inside an eatery.
Photo: AFP
Nearly a century later, “Japanese have developed a sense of getting information from three-dimensional signs”, Nose said, adding that plastic food also has a limited presence in neighboring China and South Korea.
“You’re calculating lots of things — what kind of side dishes are there, how big is the meal and is it economical?” he said.
“But for foreign tourists who don’t have this literacy, food samples are just something that closely resemble real dishes.”
The modern-day alchemy involves making a plastic mold of the real-life food and then adorning it with just the right colors to tantalize the taste buds of passing customers.
Iwasaki Co, a leading plastic food maker, has an army of craftspeople who hand paint the molds, which sell for as much as US$100 each, although restaurants can lease a fake hamburger set for about US$6 a month.
“Our main customers are restaurant owners, but plastic food samples are increasingly popular among ordinary people,” said Takashi Nakai, a spokesman for the company, which started business in 1932 when the samples were made of wax instead of today’s more durable plastic.
Iwasaki recently opened two shops in Tokyo where it sells sushi cell-phone charms and bacon-adorned key chains — all with multilingual signs warning that “this is not edible.” The shops also let visitors take a stab at creating their own fake food.
Still, high-end restaurants rarely offer such blatant visual aids, while efforts to transport the idea to the West have been less than successful, Nakai says.
“That’s partly because we need real dishes to produce food samples so geographical distance is a hurdle.”
Israeli tourist Elda Rozencvaag was not impressed.
“When I see this it makes me feel like I don’t want to eat it. It is too weird,” he said, staring a plate of perfectly formed sushi. “It has too many details — even more than in the real dish.”
Pellegrini, however, was relieved at the visual guide, even if he’s not sure what he’ll get.
“I think this is fish,” he said, pointing to a plastic squid.
“And this looks like an omelet. But I can’t be sure it’s an omelet.” It was a fishcake.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless