Japanese people like to say that they “eat with their eyes,” relishing the colors, shapes, and textures of a dish before it ever hits the tongue. The phrase applies all the more when the dish in question isn’t meant to be eaten at all. Last year, I was one of two hundred thousand people to visit “Looks Delicious!,” an exhibition organized by the cultural center Japan House London showcasing dozens upon dozens of shokuhin sampuru—mesmerizingly lifelike handmade food replicas that appear in the windows and display cases of restaurants, kiosks, and bars across Japan. Shokuhin sampuru are a roughly ninety-million-dollar industry, and a beloved part of Japanese pop culture. A few decades ago, there was a show on Japanese television in which shokuhin sampuru artisans competed to make the most convincing replicas of dishes, a sort of inverse of “Is It Cake?”

But, according to Japan House, “Looks Delicious!” marks the first time that a cultural institution has dedicated a show exclusively to food replicas. The exhibition originated last year at London’s Japan House and became its most popular show ever—perhaps in part because shokuhin sampuru feel especially pertinent in a political-cultural environment that so often confounds the real and the fake. In September, the show travelled to the Los Angeles branch of Japan House, on Hollywood Boulevard, where it will run until the end of January. A sidewalk full of stars has got nothing, in my opinion, on a stencil used to apply dark-meat detail to the muscle near a mackerel’s spine.

Shokuhin sampuru can be wondrously intricate: iridescent slivers of shrimp; striated sirloins with fatty crusts; bouncy poached eggs on the brink of first ooze; cross-sections of cabbage with the labyrinthine swirls of an elevation map; a banana split with two scoops of chocolate ice cream, their granularity evoking just a whisper of freezer burn. So it is a bit surprising that “Looks Delicious!” begins with, of all things, a humble sack of yellow onions. Simon Wright, the director of programming at Japan House London, told me, during a tour of the gallery, that a different kind of exhibit might have begun with “a whole gantry of sushi,” but that he preferred the alliums for their exuberant plainness. “Remember those strings of plastic onions that might have hung in a restaurant in the nineteen-eighties?” he said. “These are nothing like them.”

Nor did they resemble the flimsy, skinless orbs of children’s play kitchens, daring you to bat them around like Wiffle balls. The onions sat on a ceramic plate, tumbling out of a burlap sack. Breaking protocol, I picked one up. Crafted in PVC, using a silicone mold, as most food replicas have been since the nineteen-seventies, it was offensively light. I felt almost as though I’d been pranked. I could all but hear the whisper of the onions’ peeling skin, smell the green-white flesh leaking juice under my nails.

Imitation sliced pumpkin, eggplant, and octopus.

According to Yasunobu Nose, a Japanese journalist who has written extensively about shokuhin sampuru, food replicas first appeared in Japan in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when three men started simultaneously producing them in three different cities. This coincidence, Nose explains, was a result of urbanization, which brought workers to big cities, where they began to buy more of their meals outside the home. As early as the Edo period, Japanese people “decided what to eat by looking at real food,” Nose said in a recent lecture at Japan House London. While researching shokuhin sampuru, he found a nineteenth-century genre painting depicting a street festival where merchants displayed actual dishes of sushi and tempura outside their stalls. Shokuhin sampuru were a pragmatic innovation, allowing venders to follow the same long-standing custom without wasting their actual food.

Early shokuhin sampuru were relatively rough replicas molded out of wax; some pioneering artisans were more accustomed to, say, sculpting ear canals for otologists and solar systems for science classes. Even in rudimentary form, they freed customers from having to badger employees with questions or take their chances ordering a bowl of ramen, not knowing whether it would come with two slices of pork or three. Food replicas eased embarrassment, prevented disappointment, and encouraged experimentation, just as they do today. “The Japanese customer loves to know what they’re getting,” the food writer Yukari Sakamoto told me. “When I’m meeting up with my family in Tokyo, we talk and talk and look at the plastic food displays until something jumps out at us.”

The first business dedicated to the manufacture and sale of shokuhin sampuru was founded in 1932 in Osaka by Iwasaki Takizō, one of the craft’s original three practitioners. A native of Gujō Hachiman, a town in the central prefecture of Gifu, he became enthralled by wax during his boyhood. Legend has it that he got the idea for food replicas after watching a candle melt into cold water, its drippings hardening into the shape of blooming flowers. Today, the Iwasaki Group is responsible for about seventy per cent of food replicas sold in Japan. A partner in the Japan House show, the conglomerate had provided the exhibition its “Celebration Omelette,” a reproduction of a seminal piece. Iwasaki achieved the wrinkled texture of the eggs “through repeated trial and error,” an accompanying text explains, by pouring agar jelly over a real omelette his wife had just cooked. The replica sits on a gold-rimmed plate, a glossy half-moon smeared with ketchup.

“Looks Delicious!” focusses on the period beginning in the nineteen-twenties, when Western food began to make inroads in Japan, and restaurateurs—particularly in Tokyo department stores—used replicas to communicate efficiently to prospective clients what, exactly, “spaghetti” or “ham sandwich” entailed. Later, shokuhin sampuru also came to be associated with kissaten—cozy, smoke-filled cafés featuring European décor and menu items like buttered toast and strawberry shortcake. “These food replicas have this very retro, Shōwa period, nineteen-fifties-and-sixties vibe,” Wright said. If they remained somewhat crude in this era—they couldn’t be tilted, for example, lest the wax soften and start to droop in the sun—their popularity didn’t suffer. By 1958, the Iwasaki Group was exporting a passable rib eye to the United States, to be used as a promotional item by a beer company.

Japan House is funded by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the exhibition’s organizers hit upon a clever way to emphasize the diversity of food replicas and promote tourism at the same time. An entire section is dedicated to regional cuisines—a dish for each of the country’s forty-seven prefectures. There is kiritanpo nabe from the mountains of Akita, a hot-pot dish featuring mashed rice wrapped around a cedar stick and baked, and a fish-and-fiddlehead-fern ohaw, a soup from the Ainu people, who live mainly in Hokkaido. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the mouthwatering simulacrum of sudachi-sōmen—wheat-flour noodles in chicken broth, topped with a light-green citrus fruit that grows in Tokushima.

Shokuhin sampuru are famously helpful to non-Japanese-speaking visitors to Japan. But a replica of kibinago—silver-stripe herring, which are eaten as sashimi, in proximity to the warm waters of southern Japan—served as a reminder that Japanese cuisine varies so much by region that Japanese people, too, can require visual assistance. Sakamoto, the food writer, told me that, on a recent trip to Kanazawa, she relied on a food replica to apprehend the texture and size of the roe in fugu no ko nukazuke, a local dish of puffer-fish eggs fermented in rice bran. Nose, for his part, once used shokuhin sampuru to figure out where the eastern Japanese habit of garnishing hot noodle dishes with chopped white onions gave way to the western Japanese preference for green ones. “I walked from Tokyo to Kyoto—about five hundred kilometres over twenty-six days—examining food samples at each restaurant along the way,” he recalled in his lecture. “I found that, in the famous resort area of Hakone, white and green onions coexist, so Hakone marks the boundary.”

Traditionally, shokuhin sampuru artisans specialized in Western, Chinese, or Japanese cuisine. Those divisions no longer hold, but some items are considered more difficult to render faithfully than others. At Japan House, Wright paused in front of a video detailing the creation of food replicas. On the screen, a man spray-painted stripes onto a pearlescent prawn. “You expect automated conveyor belts or robot arms or whatever, but it’s not,” Wright said. “It’s completely analog, from beginning to end.” One might assume that modern technologies are threatening shokuhin sampuru, but adepts contend that, in three dimensions, they convey nuances of proportion and texture that QR codes and Yelp reviews cannot. Craig Mod, an American writer and photographer and the author of “Kissa by Kissa,” a book about visiting coffeehouses in the Japanese countryside, likened the process of assessing shokuhin sampuru to scrolling. “You’re not looking at each dish individually, you’re assessing them collectively, at a blink,” he said. “It’s like grid view on Instagram.”

A model sushi set.

However persuasive they might be as facsimiles, shokuhin sampuru are subjective interpretations, seeking not only to replicate dishes but to intensify the feelings associated with the real thing. Nose told me, “It’s like augmented reality created by skilled artisans. I think this is the magic of replica food.” A replica of red-bean paste, for example, might be grainier than actual red-bean paste, because people tend to associate red-bean paste with graininess. A kiwi might be fuller and greener than usual, because the person who made it likes her fruit especially ripe. Liquids are among the most difficult foodstuffs to render, and leafy greens, raw meats, and emulsions are where real artistry is unleashed. One of the ultimate tests of virtuosity for a shokuhin sampuru maker is said to be whipped cream.

Kappabashi Street, in Tokyo, is lined with stores selling knives, whisks, brooms, napkins, crockery, whetstones, lanterns, banners, chef uniforms, and anything else you could conceivably need to cook, serve, and sell food, including food replicas. A few shops serve as the Madame Tussauds of shokuhin sampuru, drawing customers to gawk at avocados that stay creamy forever and frothy mugs of beer that will never spill. One day in April, when I was in Japan reporting on Uniqlo, I walked into a store with an impressive selection of fruit parfaits.

“Can I get the watermelon?” a child asked.

“How about a crab?” her mother countered.

The watermelon, too expensive, was out of the question. But certain items—a gloopy-looking rice dish, a brown beef curry with a spoon suspended in the air—bore yellow tags, indicating that they were on sale. I was intrigued by the concept of marking down items that, by definition, can never go bad. The instinct toward realism extended to how the pieces were packaged and stored: replicas of perishables were displayed in long, glass-fronted cabinets that resembled freezer cases, and even the bananas were swaddled in plastic wrap. I asked a woman sitting behind the counter how the store’s management decided what to put on sale.

“They’re old-style items,” the clerk answered. “Some of them aren’t manufactured anymore.”

Newer fake foods, meanwhile, are as contingent on trends as their edible equivalents. As I walked along Kappabashi Street, I noticed trays full of sliders and jugs of sangria, garnished with parsley. The recent vogue for verticality—towering plates of food look great on Instagram—was in ample evidence: in one shop window, I counted no fewer than fifty-seven golden, syrup-drenched faux pancakes in a stack topped with a pat of butter that more closely resembled scrambled eggs. Many of the items (a pear clock, an omurice memo holder, edamame key rings) were clearly intended as keepsakes rather than as working samples.

“Where are you from?” an employee asked an American couple, as they perused a wall full of sushi kitchen magnets.

“Los Angeles,” they answered.

“How did you hear about us?”

“YouTube!” the woman replied.

At a store on Kappabashi Street, I picked up a few editions of Replica Foods! magazine, a publication that celebrates Iwasaki employees’ entries in a “replica-foods art contest.” Let loose with their heat guns and paintbrushes, the workers were taking shokuhin sampuru into fresh territory, beyond any previously charted prefecture or national cuisine. Call it food-replica Surrealism: lasagna high heels, a T. rex with potato chips for bones, a “hand-formed hamburg steak in the shape of a fist.” One shokuhin sampuru tableau, complete with grubby potholder, was entitled “Drinking alone eating a whole grilled onion as a snack.” I started to wonder whether restaurateurs ever felt pressure to make foods look like their replicas instead of the other way around.

I had the weekend free, so I decided to take a bullet train to Nagoya and then a bus to Gujō Hachiman, the birthplace of Iwasaki Takizō. The town, which has become a mecca for shokuhin sampuru, is also famous for its sixteenth-century mountainside castle. (Rebuilt in 1933, it is something of a replica itself.) It was late cherry-blossom season, and the town was lovely, with a central thoroughfare and small bridges spanning a burbling bend of the Yoshida River. I was just in time to make it to the day’s final replica-making workshop at Sample Village Iwasaki, a sort of immersive corporate visitor center.

I knew I was in the right place as soon as I arrived at a white building where a bust of Iwasaki Takizō presided over a courtyard. A model fish that must have been twelve feet long hung over the entryway. Inside, in a visitor center, food replicas were everywhere. Near the cash register was a fake, hollow pineapple serving as a vase, filled with artificial flowers meant to look as though they were carved out of milk and white chocolate—an Inedible Arrangement. On a table, in metal trays, was an entire fake-food buffet. For two thousand yen, you could take a plastic container and, using tongs, stuff it with your choice of fried chicken, pieces of cauliflower, macarons, razor clams. Shokuhin sampuru is a century-old craft, but this faux feast felt strangely apt in a contemporary culinary-dietary culture that tries to decouple food from taste, encouraging eating with your eyes as a form of abstinence, rather than as a prelude to a meal.

Color is airbrushed onto a replica squid.

An Iwasaki employee works on a replica.

An employee gave me a green cotton apron. I had chosen the sushi package, and we were going to make a two-piece set of maguro (tuna) and ikura (salmon roe). Two silicone molds awaited us on a stainless-steel work surface. The middle of the table was cut out, like a touch tank at an aquarium, and filled vats of colorful liquid, sitting in several inches of water.

“It’s paraffin wax,” the employee said.

She gave me a ladle and indicated that I should dip it into one of the vats. It filled with bright-orange liquid wax, for the ikura, which I poured into an oval-shaped mold. Then I did the maguro. The wax was so hot that my glasses were fogging up. The employee waved a paddle-shaped fan over the concoction, to make it dry more quickly. After a few minutes, she gave me permission to pop the fish pieces out of the molds. Thrillingly, the maguro came out veiny, just like real maguro. I moved on to the ginger-making station, which involved pouring flesh-colored wax into a tub of cool water, where it coagulated in thin sheets. I picked them off the water’s surface and squinched them into little light-pink bouquets.

Now it was time to assemble the sushi. I picked at the edges of the roe, removing a few stray pieces—highly satisfying, like shaving the lint off a sweater. Then I smooshed the roe onto a bed of rice and wrapped the bundle with a strip of nori. The employee handed me a soldering iron. It smoked and hissed as I pressed the tip to the bundle, binding seaweed to rice. “The preparation of a wax sandwich is not at all unlike the preparation of a real one,” Wim Wenders intones in his 1985 documentary “Tokyo-Ga,” which includes a long sequence about the production of shokuhin sampuru. He was right. We were cooking. A more elaborate piece would require hours of painstaking painting, but, for a beginner, all that was left to do was to spray the pieces of sushi with a varnish, rendering them as shiny as if they’d been plucked right out of the sea.

After the session, I got to talking—via Google Translate—with Yukiko Takada, an Iwasaki employee who was standing near a display case filled with fish of various colors and sizes. After beginning her professional life as a bank clerk, she’d been working as a shokuhin sampuru maker for about ten years. “Coloring is the hardest part, but I’m working on it every day,” she told me. She gestured at a speckled trout in the case. “Maybe ten more years,” she said, and she would be allowed to paint the spots on its belly.

I went back to the register and paid for a fruit-parfait kit. I couldn’t leave without trying my hand at whipped cream. ♦