Narrator: Walking the streets of Japan,
you'll notice that almost every restaurant
has glistening, perfectly plated food
tempting you from their window.
It looks mouthwatering, but you can't actually eat it.
It's all fake.
These deceptive dishes are called sampuru,
from the word "sample."
The fake foods are made of plastic,
and to this day each one is crafted by hand.
Narrator: Sampuru is so lucrative, the industry is estimated
to be worth $90 million in Japan alone.
But let's take a step back and see how
they make plastic look good enough to eat.
At the Morino Sample Workshop in Osaka,
artisans have been making sampuru for 45 years.
Fourteen artisans make all of the food samples
shipped worldwide for the company Fake Food Japan.
They specialize in sushi, tempura, and ramen,
but they can custom-make just about anything
you can dream up.
Beer, ice cream, pizza, burgers.
To craft sample food, first the artisans
have to get a mold of the real thing.
Usually, that means a restaurant will have to freeze
the real food and ship it to the workshop.
Narrator: Once they've got a mold, it's
filled with liquid PVC plastic
and baked up to 338 degrees.
The sample is brought to life with airbrushing
and paint, and finally it's plated.
Some smaller models can take a day to make,
while entire entrees can take up to a week.
Narrator: Because of the detail in each food sample,
artisans say it takes up to 10 years to perfect the craft.
But don't be fooled, while they might
look like affordable eats,
sampuru will set you back a pretty penny.
These imitations can cost up to 10 times
the real food they represent.
This mug of beer costs $74, a bowl of ramen costs 109,
and an intricate tray of sushi
will set you back a whopping $511.
The level of difficulty in reproducing it,
that is solely the cost.
Just based on the fact that the ingredients
and the way it's presented just creates so much more
and a level of difficulty for the artist to reproduce it.
Narrator: It's said that fake food production
began in the 1930s with Takizo Iwasaki,
an artisan from Gujo Hachiman.
Story goes, he made an omelet out of wax
that was so realistic his wife
couldn't tell it apart from the real thing.
He would go on to start one of the biggest
plastic food manufacturers in Japan
that now controls an estimated 60% of the fake food market.
By the 1950s, fake food had caught a wave of popularity.
Hanus: However, what really boosted the business
was during World War II, from what I've been told,
when a lot of the American servicemen were stationed here
and they couldn't obviously read the Japanese menus
and there weren't any photos on the menus,
so then let's have a visual representation
to show people what we actually have on our menu.
Narrator: Today, even in an era of online menus,
food blogs, and Yelp reviews,
these plastic food samples aren't going anywhere.
Sampuru has landed on the big screen,
in classrooms, and souvenir shops,
and, of course, in restaurant windows.
As mass tourism has exploded in Japan,
sampuru has served as an invaluable tool
for foreigners across language barriers.
Even if they don't know any Japanese,
they can just point at what they want to eat.
Hanus: It's something that's very unique
to this country, something that's been around for going
on now, you know, almost 100 years and it still survived.
Narrator: Its significance in Japanese culture
can be seen on literally every corner,
but it's the skill behind the sampuru
art form that keeps us salivating.