Akiko Obata - World Largest Collection of over 8,000 pieces Model Guinness Records - Sampuru Fake Food in Japan
Akiko Obata has been fascinated by plastic food ever since she was a child, and 10 years ago she started collecting all sorts of plastic food items, amassing a collection of over 8,000 individual pieces.
“Sampuru”, the fake food displays used by most restaurants to showcase their dishes to potential diners, is an important part of Japanese food culture. They are considered superior to menus, as they give customers a much better idea of what they’ll be getting on their plates, and also help restaurant owners better showcase their dishes. Sampuru makers often go above and beyond to make their products as realistic as possible, and some do really look good enough to eat. Plastic foods are so popular in Japan that some people have actually started collecting them
Akiko Obata, arguably the world’s most committed plastic food collector, fell in love with Sampuru over 30 years ago, when her sister brought home a number of discarded fake food displays from the restaurant she was working in. They all looked so deliciously real, and she found them mesmerizing. However, she only started collecting plastic food items 15 years ago, and in 2015 she had already bagged the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of prepared food related items.
Obata, who lives near Narita Airport, in Chiba Prefecture has a soft spot for plastic desserts, but her impressive collection features all kinds of dishes, from several styles of burgers and pizzas, to spaghetti complete with suspended forks, and traditional Japanese foods like sushi.
Replicas are not real food, but I truly respect how each of them are made to look so real,” the collector told Design Made in Japan.
Obata has a whole room in her home dedicated to her record-setting plastic food collection, and claims that it took Guinness representatives an entire day to go through all her 8083 items. While some are life-size representations of various dishes, others, like food-shaped key-chains, are tiny.
In Japan, (shokuhin sampuru, taken from the English "sample") are widespread. During the early Shōwa period, in the late 1920s, Japanese artisans and candle makers developed food models that made it easy for patrons to order without the use of menus, which were not common in Japan at that time. Paraffin was used to create these until the mid-1980s, but because its colors faded when exposed to heat or sunlight, manufacturers later switched to polyvinyl chloride, which is "nearly eternal".
The plastic models are mostly handmade from polyvinyl chloride and sculpted to look like the actual dishes. The models can be custom-tailored to individual restaurants and even common items such as ramen can be modified to match each establishment's food. During the molding process, the imitation ingredients are often chopped up and combined in a manner similar to actual cooking.
Many restaurants in Japan use replicas to display their popular dishes in their windows and attract customers. The plastic food manufacturers fiercely guard their trade secrets as business is lucrative; the plastic food industry in Japan, by conservative estimates, has revenues of billions of yen per year. A single restaurant may order a complete menu of plastic items costing over a million yen.
The plastic replicas are much more expensive than the food they imitate, but can last indefinitely. For this reason, many companies that manufacture fake food have stagnant or declining profits. In recent years,[when?] Japanese plastic food manufacturers have been targeting markets overseas, including China and South Korea.
The craftsmanship has been raised to an art form. Japanese plastic food models by the Maizuru Company were exhibited at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 1980. Regular competitions are held in making fake food dishes out of plastic and other materials.
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