Fake food makers aim higher than the real thing

Image might not be everything, but in Japan it certainly counts for a great deal.

The way a dish looks, for example, is just as important as how it tastes.

In a unique innovation that invariably intrigues foreign tourists, many Japanese restaurants show customers what to expect from the menu by displaying elaborately-made and impressively realistic plastic food samples out front.

Since they were introduced in Osaka in 1932, fake foods have spawned a vast industry and become a fixture at many restaurants and eateries.

Mitsuo Shimada, a creator with more than 16 years of experience in the business, says that coming up with food replicas that look just like the real thing is not good enough for people in his line of work.

The motto of his company, Iwasaki Co., which along with member companies of the Iwasaki group accounts for about 60 percent of the domestic market, is "to make artificial foods look tastier than real foods."

Success requires meticulous attention to detail.

The 34-year-old says that his greatest achievement has been finding a way to create realistic Japanese leeks, a condiment widely used in Japanese dishes.

In the past, plastic food makers would roll a thin, white board of resin into long strips. The unconvincing result, when sliced, looked like a cluster of inorganic, white rings.

Shimada focused on recreating the subtle color shades at the core of the vegetable-- which lie somewhere between yellow and green--and the barely visible surface fibers.

Now, his fake leeks droop more when they are cut into finer strips. Their layers loosen when sliced. This makes a crucial difference, he says.

"If a condiment does not look realistic," he says, "it ruins the whole noodle dish, even if everything else is nicely done."

Born in Saitama Prefecture, Shimada aspired to work in the manufacturing industry from a young age.

"This is a job off the beaten path," Shimada says. "I figured that there must not be many people doing it."

But getting a job was harder than he thought. For each position, there were more than 10 applicants.

Although he eventually found a job, Shimada soon discovered that the early stages of his career would be anything but smooth.

For more than a year, he was made to work on a basic procedure of making silicon molds. It was much longer than the amount of time spent on the process by the average junior employee.

Shimada was forced to stick at it because several young employees had quit and there were not enough juniors to take over from him.

It was frustrating, he recalls, to see peers who had joined the company the same year as he moving on to bigger and better things--painting, putting fake sauce on dishes and arranging imitation foods on a plate--while he was stuck with a subordinate role.

"I tried to keep going, telling myself that I wasn't behind them as far as my skills were concerned," he says. "I would be rewarded one day for my long apprenticeship."

To improve, he began to research what kinds of ingredients are used to make various dishes and how those dishes look. He bought cookbooks and started cooking himself.

If particular foods interested him, he went out to try them first hand.

This growing interest in foods helped.

When he finally won the right to apply finishing touches to fake foods, he felt sure he was up to the job.

"Nobody, I thought, was better prepared than I was to take on the new duty," he says.

Gradually he accumulated experience at making all sorts of plastic food samples, for Japanese and Western foods, confectionery and soft drinks.

So far he has manufactured 330,000 pieces.

Making a confectionery sample is harder, he says, because it is often served on its own and tends to come under close scrutiny from potential customers, unlike a single dish that is made with a variety of ingredients.

It is not rare, Shimada says, for a client to ask him to make the width of bean paste narrower by 1 millimeter.

In one case, he had to redo 400 fake mugwort rice cakes because a customer was not happy with the texture of the small grains.

Those experiences underscored how hard it can be to come up with samples for customers who have trouble articulating exactly what they want.

"We are not artists," Shimada says. "Our job is to make something as faithfully as possible to the real thing. Sometimes it feels as if we're looking for an answer to something that has no answer."

He occasionally makes a little side trip to Tokyo Station, the country's gateway to its railway network, to observe fake foods in souvenir shops.

He says that he has occasionally taken great inspiration from products from rival companies.

In the imitation food industry, there is a basic process to follow, but there is no "correct way" to create a product.

"That is why there is a great deal of room for us to experiment and try new things to enhance our skills and methods of presentation," Shimada says.

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Demand for plastic meals goes stale

The market for plastic food samples was about 8.4 billion yen ($92 million) in 2007, according to an estimate by JMA Research Institute Inc.

Rentals outstripped purchases by three to one.

More than 80 percent of samples were produced on order.

Demand has been stagnant in recent years as restaurants try to trim costs.

But manufacturers are winning over new clients who find them attractive as accessories and gift items.

There are an estimated 200 manufacturers of artificial foods nationwide.

The Iwasaki group, including two leading players under the same name based in Tokyo and Osaka city, controls about 60 percent of the domestic market.

Fake food samples were introduced after the late Ryuzo Iwasaki founded the company in Osaka in 1932. The same year, Sogo department store there became the first to display them.

After the war, the company expanded its sales network nationwide.

In Gujo, Gifu Prefecture, from where Iwasaki hailed, about 10 manufacturers provide workshops to tourists.

Until about 20 years ago, the standard procedure was to make a mold with Japanese agar and to cast with wax. Agar has since been replaced with silicon, and wax with resin幼hanges that have made the production process easier and the products more durable.

One thing remains unchanged, though. Most of the process is carried out by hand.