Things I bought in Japan: realistic food magnets.

Japan has a whole industry for food samples, realistic fake food. Many restaurants have displays of their menu items outside. Instead of looking at a menu, you just look at the almost-real thing.

The craftsmanship is astounding. The food truly looks real: shiny where it needs to be, matte where that is appropriate. Colours, colour gradients, marbling, textures.

At many street food stalls, I recognized the food on display as not real not by its looks, but by its lack of smell, and then realizing how impractical a large display of the real thing would be: expensive, wasteful, unhygienic.

For retail sales, there were earrings, magnets, hair clips, etc. I bought two magnets as souvenirs. They’re life-size and thus a bit impractical as actual magnets for holding things up, so I guess they’ll just be decorating the fridge.

The sushi magnet is a piece of tuna nigiri. (Of course you could by fake nigiri with different kinds of toppings.) Having sampled a whole lot of sushi during our trip, I concluded that fatty tuna was my favourite kind of sushi.

The egg is a soy-marinated egg. I ate a lot of those – daily for breakfast, towards the end of the trip – and it’s the one Japanese food that I think I can bring home with me: I should be able to reproduce it and have it come out like the real thing.

There was a whole wall of food-shaped magnets at the shop where I bought mine.

I could have bought a bowl of soup, or perhaps a bento box, or why not a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce.