What is sampuru and why do the Japanese sell food that cannot be eaten

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Some time ago, the Internet was shocked by a video that caused a huge amount of controversy and gossip. In the video, a man briskly cast graceful cabbage leaves out of plastic, simultaneously painting them in a natural greenish color. "We're being fed plastic!" - gullible spectators lamented. However, in reality, it was about sampuru - special plastic food for Japanese restaurants.

Sampuru is not meant to feed plastic food to customers. The purpose of this artificial yet extremely realistic looking food is to attract customers to Japanese restaurants. And this practice is especially popular today, when there are so many tourists in Japan who do not know a word of the local language. In the end, it is much easier for a foreigner to understand from the window whether this institution can offer him what he wants, and it is easier to point the waiter at the dish with his finger than to fight with a google translator on his smartphone.

The history of sampuru began back in 1917, but then artificial food was used exclusively as home decor - just like artificial plants. However, a few years later, some restaurants noticed that as soon as such food was put on display, the profit of the establishment increased significantly. Moreover, if you place a sampura not only on the outside showcase in order to attract new visitors, but also inside the dining room, then visitors determine the order more quickly, more often make a choice in favor of more expensive dishes, and foreigners have the opportunity to order their own dinner more deliberately.

Now this focus is used by almost all establishments in Japan where you can eat. Moreover, a sampuru sometimes costs quite impressive money (up to a million yen, or $ 8,500), and a plastic copy can cost 10 times more than the dish itself from the restaurant. Restaurants order exact replicas of their own dishes, and such replicas should, of course, look exceptionally natural and appetizing.

Given the popularity of plastic food in Japan, is it any wonder that sampuru has a huge industry associated with it. The undisputed leader, controlling about 80% of all sampuru production, is Iwasaki Be-I. in 1932, its founder, Riozo Iwasaki, was one of the first to make food out of plastic. He moved to Osaka and there his products were incredibly successful.

Sampuru is, of course, not only a business, but also an art. The bulk of the food is made for special customers by their special examples - and examples are real meals with food. So the shape, size, color - everything is different, depending on the original. The entire process of making sampuru is not disclosed, but it is known that such food is painted by hand.

And since there is manual work, then there are collectors. There are several collectors in Japan who collect unique specimens of sampura. However, even an ordinary tourist can buy something for himself - for this you need to go to the area between Ueno and Asakusa, where there is a street known as "Kitchen Town" - absolutely everything for the restaurant business is sold here, ranging from chairs, plates, tablecloths, ending, in fact, sampura.

A few years ago, Clinic 212 studio decided to show how ordinary Eastern European food can be presented in a Japanese way. What they did in the end, you can see in the article Eastern European Sushi.