‘Strange and exciting’: Japanese food sculpture goes on show in London

The silver-stripe round herring is a delicate fish with a metallic band along its flanks. It can only be eaten fresh in the area where it’s caught – the warm waters of southern Japan in Kagoshima prefecture. Served as kibinago sashimi, it has become a regional delicacy: tiny shiny fish served on a plate, coiled like chainmail.

If your 2024 travel plans don’t include Kagoshima, you could instead head to Kensington, London, to see this dish. From October, a very special version of kibinago sashimi will be on display at the Japan House cultural centre as part of Looks Delicious! This is the UK’s first exhibition of ­sampuru , the realistic food replicas used in Japan in place of printed menus.

The show’s curator, Simon Wright, director of programming at Japan House, said: “Anyone who’s been to Japan will have seen food replicas outside restaurants and no doubt been intrigued; they are not really found anywhere else in the world. The opportunity to see them outside the country is rare: there hasn’t been an exhibition like this before in the UK – and there probably hasn’t been one created this way in Japan either.”

Takizo Iwasaki, a businessman from Gujō Hachiman in Gifu prefecture, started making sampuru for restaurants in the early 1930s. At the time, restaurants were proliferating and many had started selling western-inspired dishes – known as yōshoku – unfamiliar to customers. Iwasaki’s brainwave was to recreate dishes from wax so people could see what they would be eating. His business is still a major player in sampuru today.

His first dish was an omelette stuffed with rice. Department stores and restaurants adopted these models, known as food samples, and they are used to this day – though typically made of PVC – displayed in the same way a menu is used in other cultures.

Kappabashi Dogugai Street in Tokyo – known as Kitchen Town – sells sampuru to the capital’s restaurants. Many are handmade in workshops. While creating decorative fruit, vegetables and other foodstuffs isn’t particular to Japan, sampuru is an artform. As Wright explains, these are done by hand using moulds made of the different dish elements. “The work is remarkably unmechanised, and pieces are made individually to order.”

Sam Thorne, director general at Japan House, said: “Sampuru is strange and exciting because it’s a kind of hyperrealistic sculpture in miniature – trompe l’oeil trickery in three dimensions. One curious aspect is that when you watch people crafting them, as captured so wonderfully in Wim Wenders’s 1985 documentary Tokyo -Ga , you notice that the process is a lot like cooking: individual ingredients are sliced, combined, arranged, plated.”

Ayumi Kuwata runs the Smile Labo workshop in Canterbury, where visitors can experience the fun of making miniature food: ice-cream sundaes, doughnuts and other treats. Kuwata trained in Japan but says that her skills and materials are completely different from those of the sampuru craftspeople.

“You don’t see food samples outside of Japan because they’re so expensive, and the skilled professionals only exist in Japan,” she says.

The price of top-quality sampuru is such that most Japanese stores rent rather than buy. Though a visitor to the Iwasaki company’s Ganso store could pick up a sampuru bowl of onion gratin soup for £100 as a souvenir, a restaurant display piece costs thousands.

For Looks Delicious!, Iwasaki has been commissioned to create 47 sampuru, one for each of Japan’s prefectures,showcasing regional specialities to provide a cultural history of Japanese cuisine. Among the dishes will be goya chanpuru – bitter melon stir-fry – from Okinawa and seafood from Hokkaido. The show also explains how food models have become an integral part of nutritional education in Japan.

Wright said he is particularly fond of these sampuru. “My favourite is the collection of models which illustrate the ingredients required to make a daily balanced diet for someone with diabetes and show the amount of salt, fat or sugar found in some popularly eaten foods.”

Jake Hobson runs Niwaki, a shop that imports gardening and kitchen equipment from Japan to the UK, and uses sampuru for his kitchenware displays. He first encountered food samples when he lived in Japan in the 1990s, first as a sculptor then as a gardener.

“Though food samples are commonplace they’re also beautiful and handcrafted, and these works deserve a showcase. You can be snotty about whether something is art or a craft – but someone has sat and created these sampuru by hand.”

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Hobson thinks this niche skill is a good example of Japanese craft: “They have this ability to create something which improves on the original. It happens in gardening, my field, where you try to improve the look of a tree or a plant. You see it with manga or anime. They’re trying to make something better on their terms – the amazing details in sampuru are part of that.”

Wright notes that there is also a strong commercial purpose to sampuru, which is why they’re found in abundance around manufacturing hubs such as Osaka and Tokyo. He also thinks sampuru show something inherent to Japanese culture.

“Attention to detail, superb craftsmanship, pride in precision-making – these are all tropes about manufacturing in Japan. They are no less applicable to the manufacture of food replicas. Sampuru often appear more appealingly real than the real thing. The replicas themselves can become the aspiration.”