Otakon 2026 Interview: Food Replica Master Oka Kunio

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Oka Kunio, a nationally famous food replica maker from Japan, was a guest at Otakon 2026. I got to attend his panel, as well as conduct a one-on-one interview with the man, and have included both below.

Panel Notes

Oka began by giving a brief history of food replicas, starting off with how a wax modeler was once asked to make replicas of sashimi so that a restaurant could show off their food for a long time. After some trial and error, they found success. Originally, the molds were made from agar, and the resulting product was wax. Other restaurants also began asking for similar displays, but the wax back then came with problems, notably a yellow color that made it hard to work with foods that weren’t yellow. But American paraffin wax didn’t have a color, and it became the standard.

When making the molds, agar was poured over real food, and then colored wax was poured into the molds, with the burrs removed afterward. Additionally color was done with oil and small brushes, and an oil-and-resin varnish was used for polish. Like the yellow wax, varnish had a color which made it difficult to use when replicating certain foods, but clear/uncolored varnish was eventually created.

According to Oka, it’s said that mastering food modeling takes 10 years.

As for his own origins, he was a high schooler and student council president with a keen interest in cooking. He even worked part-time in the food business. Unfortunately, his dad passed away during that time, and he gave up going to college and having a culinary career. He did, however, enter the world of food replicas.

His modeling teacher was a typical craftsman; he always looked serious and couldn’t tell what he was saying. As part of his work, Oka had to mold rice by hand, grain by grain. He also had to color without using a regular airbrush, and instead had to use a blowing tool as his “airbrush.” Preventing mold from forming in breadcrumbs was also an ongoing challenge.

He also recalled that wax samples could melt during deliveries, and had switched to gelatin at some point, and later down the line other materials.

Oka then showed some examples, including a coffee replica made for a family friend’s restaurant, as well as a custard pudding that actually jiggled. The latter was used on a variety show as a prank, and it actually tricked people into taking bites! He also recalled one instance of a kid who bit into some of his fake French fries at a revolving sushi restaurant, and another who tried to eat a replica dorayaki. Another notable television appearance was on the Ultraman Dash Variety, where  a member of Arashi had to try to make fake custard pudding as his challenge.

Outside of food, Oka was also hired to make replicas of human anatomical features, such as blood vessels. He remarked that a softer PVC was used to recreate the feel of blood vessels.

When asked about if he had ever made fantasy foods, he said no, but thinks he is capable of doing so. For him, no food is impossible to replicate because if he gives up on one, he’ll start to give up on more. The color of sashimi and meat is a challenge though.

At the end of the panel, we were informed that he had some of his work on display near one of the information booths.

The next day, on August 1, I conducted my interview.

Hello, it’s very nice to talk to you, Mr. Oka. Just to start off, I had seen the food replicas in Japan when I’d been there, and they were very nice, but I had assumed that those replicas were things made in machines and factories—that there were craftsmen like you behind them. That’s something I learned. In that regard, the first thing I want to ask is, do you have any philosophy for what makes food look delicious?

That’s a difficult question. The only thing I think about is how to make it as realistic as possible.

It seems like you’re geared toward making food look good and realistic. Have you ever had to do the opposite, and make food that didn’t look good on purpose?

Food from a long time ago might not be as glossy as food from the modern day. It might not be the right way to say it, but rice from the past might not be as clean, so I have to replicate that.

Would this be because your replicas were being used in a television show or something, where they were purposely meant to look like something from an older time?

Yes, it was for television. I had to replicate a meal from a long time ago. My samples are also being used at museums.

What would you say is the most unusual food you’ve ever had to craft?

Everything is somewhat unexpected, but I made examples for the Nagoya Public Aquarium before. I had to use the meat of the takaashi crab (Japanese spider crab) and make gunkan sushi out of it to show how sushi you could make out of one crab. I’ve also had to make nigiri sushi out of fish in a similar way.

Was there something about takaashi crab that was special or unique? I’m unfamiliar with it—is it considered a typical crab or something unusual?

It’s commonly eaten in Japan.

What is an important lesson about your work that you learned over the years that you could teach yourself when you were first starting?

I really like food samples. I think having passion for it is important.

Interesting. I went to your panel yesterday, and you mentioned working 50 years in this industry, this craft. Have there been any interesting changes or trends in terms of what the restaurants and customers want from you over the years? Anything that has changed about the foods or the things they want from the replicas?

The main difference is that when I first started I used wax, but nowadays I use silicone or vinyl.

Is there anything that the restaurants ask of you that’s different from how it used to be?

I’ve been requested to not only replicate food but also tea and injuries from blood vessels.

In that regard, I also saw you had created those anatomical models in your panel yesterday. Was that something the hospitals came to you about, or was it something you thought up yourself?

It was a request from the hospitals.

You mentioned yesterday that you had to replicate the feel of the blood vessels. How did you replicate that feel?

I did some hearings with doctors, asking how they look. I also looked at different photos. But of course, not all blood vessels look the same, so I talked over the phone a lot with the doctors.

I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Taiwan, and the reason I mention this is because at one of their museums, there’s two famous pieces there, which are called the Meat-Shaped Stone and the Jadeite Cabbage—both of them being essentially food replicas from I believe the 19th Century.

I wanted to ask if you have ever seen them or if you know about them.

I haven’t, but I’d be very interested to see them.

I would recommend it, and as someone with your skills and abilities, I’d be interested to see what you thought about them. A funny thing was that I was very fascinated by them, but the people I traveled with didn’t really have much interest in a stone shaped like meat. I would love to see what you think of it if you get the chance to see it in person.

You’d have to be interested!

In terms of non-Japanese foods, I know you’ve created a lot of replicas for then. Do you have to approach them differently compared to Japanese foods?

In order to make the samples, I need to see the real thing. So sometimes, when I have to make ones for non-Japanese food, I don’t have access to the freshest food. So sometimes, I’m not sure if the mold will work well or not.

How do you try to get around that limitation?

I usually look at the pictures and I get specific measurements of the food. There can be shrinkage with the food as well. Also, people have different perceptions and can see color differently, so when the person requesting it can deliver the request as accurately as possible, that’s usually when things go most successfully.

This goes back to the museum talk, but how would you feel if your replicas were in a museum as well, maybe 200 years in the future?

I would be so happy! That’s it.

If you had to put one in the museum right now, which would it be?

One that I like?

Yes.

Right now, I want to make tuna sushi.

That’s all the time I have. Thank you! It was very informative.

Street Fighter 6, Arjun, and a Natural Physique

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I haven’t played Street Fighter 6 in quite a while, but I have been paying attention to the new DLC characters, especially their visual presentation. Every fighter looks great and oozes individuality in ways that feel faithful to both the realistic and fantastical aspects of the series, but one character who drew my attention in particular was Arjun.

Like the classic SF2 character Dhalsim, Arjun hails from India. Physically, however, they are very different. Dhalsim is relatively average in height and has virtually no fat on his body, to the point of looking almost starved, as a representation of how his yoga training has allowed him to transcend the body’s limitations. Arjun, on the other hand, is a massive 6’9” and 320 lbs. Interestingly, however, while he’s naturally got more meat on his bones than Dhalsim, he also looks a lot “smoother,” with a lot less muscle definition compared to a large chunk of the cast, both male and female. It’s a conscious design decision that I think is really awesome, and a continuation of SF6’s move towards having a greater variety of body types while still having everyone look like capable fighters.

To me, the way the muscles and fat sit on Arjun gives the impression that he mainly does body weight exercises (including those found in yoga) and has a lot of practical strength. His muscles are large but not massive, and his abs are visible but not extremely cut. He comes across to me as an exaggerated version of a strongman or athlete from an older era, like Charles Atlas or Karl Gotch.

Screenshot

If you compare Arjun to other towering figures, the differences become even clearer. Zangief also has a layer of fat, but the muscles underneath make him seem like someone who’s gone through harsh training (wrestling bears!) dedicated to building up as much mass as possible. Sagat returned to having a relatively lankier frame reminiscent of his SF2 design (as opposed to the mountain of muscle he’s been since the Alpha games) that is more in line with what Muay Thai fighters look like.

I think what I especially like about Arjun is that he makes an impression while having less defined musculature compared to what you typically see in fighting games and media. In a world where movie stars have to undergo ridiculous amounts of training, dehydration, and possibly even steroids to gain bodybuilder physiques, you have a literal fictional character who eschews that aesthetic.

Those Were the Days of Our Lives: Goodbye, Lara

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From the very beginning, Goodbye, Lara is a gorgeous work of animation. With its visual style reminiscent of both storybooks and 90s anime, intriguing plot loosely based on The Little Mermaid, and world mixing the mundane and the mysterious, it comes right out of the gate making a powerful impression. I’ve seen similar series with similar potential falter at the finish line, however, and as I watched this show I kept hoping beyond hope that it would not meet a similar fate.

Fortunately, I think it not only sticks the landing beautifully but is strong the entire way through. One thing that I think it does splendidly is having the little slice of time called the “present” feel truly special for its mermaid heroine Lara. The passage of time is a major component of Goodbye Lara, and the intimate focus on daily life amid her desperate mission to find love makes the mundane downright magical.

While the execution and results are very different, the use of time brings to mind the series Apocalypse Hotel. In a sense, it and Goodbye, Lara tackle the coming and going of ages in opposite ways. Whereas the former takes brief yet poignant looks at specific periods over a long span, the latter  intensely focuses on a specific period amid an enormous time span. When Lara says that she cherishes her life in this situation, it comes across as heartfelt and convincing.

Overall, we have a great original anime here. Goodbye, Lara is playful, evokes a lot of complex emotions, and somehow captures both the whimsy of youth and a deeply resonant maturity.

Heaping Helpings: Rice Curry Manten 

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Earlier this year, I traveled to Japan and went on a tear eating at as many curry restaurants as I could. I wanted to try all sorts of different places and styles, from the basic to the foreign to Japan.

One spot was Rice Curry Manten. Japanese curry in general is a very humble food, but what they serve at Manten is like a no-nonsense mechanic: It’s there to fill you up with few frills, and it’s dedicated to that job. It’s been around for decades, and site reviews praise it for its generous portions and affordable prices. While an oft-recurring joke is that Japanese food portions are miniscule compared to what you find in the US, this place is definitely what I’d call “America-worthy.” 

While the katsu curry seems to be the go-to, I instead opted for what I’d call a unique menu item: shumai curry. I’ve been going to dim sum all my life so I am very familiar with shumai (as well as how it tends to differ in Japanese cuisine), and I really wanted to see the approach this curry restaurant would take.

The answer: Make them huge and deep fry them. They were easily the biggest shumai I’d ever seen in any context, and I got plenty of pieces to boot. As for the main part of the dish (the rice and the curry), it was satisfactory. The rice was cooked well and the sauce was satisfyingly salty and savory. That said, because I was trying to eat my way through Japan, I did not opt for the largest servings, and in that sense, I may have not had the true Rice Curry Manten experience.

Prior to going, a friend told me about how they used to serve a kind of kitchen-sink meal, where they threw literally every topping onto a massive pile of curry rice. However, there was apparently so much wasted food from people giving up on finishing it that they stopped having it as an option. My only regret is not being able to try this for myself, or at least see someone else tackle the Manten monster.

What Does “Skin-Deep” Really Mean?: Tamon’s B-Side

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Tamon’s B-Side is a shoujo manga that first got on my radar because it received praise from hololive VTuber La+ Darknesss. She’s an extremely prolific reader of manga, and even if our tastes don’t necessarily align, I know I’m in for an experience, and I decided that the anime adaptation would be a reasonable way to see what the series is all about. 
What I did not expect is for the premise of the series to make me think about a fairly involved philosophical question: What should you consider “the real you”?

The story follows Kinoshita Utage, a high school girl who’s a big fan of the male idol group F/ACE (pronounced “face”), especially its center, the impossibly handsome and suave Fukuhara Tamon. To her surprise, she’s assigned one day for her part-time work to housekeep for the real Tamon himself, only to discover that the confident ladykiller he appears to be in public is nothing more than a facade, and that he’s actually a nervous wreck prone to self-derision when not in “performance” mode. Utage is such an ultra-fan, however, that she refuses to let anyone badmouth Tamon—even himself. Over time, she gets to know the other members of F/ACE as well, which includes their own “inner selves.”

Not long after I started watching the anime, I saw a person on social media reacting to a piece of a comic called “Love vs. Lust.” Apparently, the comic and the above reaction drew so much attention that they’re both featured on Know Your Meme.

While the comment is an attempt to dunk on millennials, I think the poster’s implied values make for an interesting discussion, and also map onto Tamon’s dilemma very well. In front of outsiders, he’s an incredible talent brimming with confidence, but behind doors, he sees himself as the very opposite. And yet, all that talent and ability he displays in public are undeniably products of his own talent and effort. It’s also not uncommon for flamboyant performers on stage to be much more quiet in private, e.g. Freddy Mercury.

We live in a world where even regular people try to create a “brand” for themselves and curate their own image. This can easily make one’s outward image an endless cascade of smoke and mirrors, and for the unadorned self to be rejected in a sad and unfortunate way. But what if someone lives in a situation where their core being is denied by those closest to them, and it isn’t a place where they feel “at home”? What if their main way of finding their true selves comes from a social media account, or even going into chatrooms in the year 2000 and talking with people sharing the same hobby? How does this interact with a topic like sexuality or gender or gender dysphoria? 

Tamon, with his two sides, is like a “safer” version of these topics. And the fact that Tamon goes back and forth means it’s more like asking what if there were two Ships of Theseus where both were 50% old and 50% new parts.

Over the Garden Wall and Cats of the Geriatric Variety

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I watch Over the Garden Well as an annual tradition, and it’s always a fun time returning to its haunting and whimsical world and reuniting with its eccentric characters. However, I find that I notice something new every time.

In the episode “Schooltown Follies,” Greg is hanging out with a bunch of wild animals, when he decides to teach them a game called “two old cat.” According to him, this involves trying to find two old cats—though the cats can’t be too old. For many years, I thought this was just some strange, arbitrary idea Greg came up with, but things changed with a rewatch of the penultimate episode, “Into the Unknown.”

Unlike the other parts of Over the Garden Wall, “Into the Unknown” is focused on the “real world” that Greg and his brother Wirt came from. During their shenanigans, the two end up at a house party, and they pass by two teens having a conversation about different stick ball games: 

“Yeah, man, there’s lots of bat-and-ball games besides baseball—one old cat, two old cat, stoolball, roundball…”

It turns out that “two old cat” is an actual game! But more importantly, it opens up a window into how Greg perceives and absorbs the things he hears. Somehow, despite it being a fleeting moment, the words “two old cat” buried themselves in his memories. Greg then proceeded to just come up with his own idea of what this mysterious game was about, using his childish imagination, and the world of the Unknown feeds into it by providing old cats.

I wonder what I’ll end up discovering in future watches.

Ro, Ro, Ro Your Bots: Ogiue Maniax Status Update for October 2026

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It’s that time again—the one where I go, “What the hell, there’s a new anime season out?!” But Fall 2026 feels extra special in the sense that it is chock full of giant robots. Not only is there a new Magic Rayearth, but also Good Smile’s new project Dandivine, Dark Machine, and whatever Vertex Force is. I’m not going to say any of them will necessarily be good (aside from Rayearth), but I really want to check all of them out. On top of that, we still have Oshii Mamoru’s new VOTOMS waiting in the wings, and the director of Godzilla Minus One apparently has a mecha-genre film due out in January.

I don’t know if this will be a new golden age or anything, but I’m hoping that at least one of the new original works shows promise. It’ll also be fun to see if any of them get into Super Robot Wars someday.

Thank you to my Patreon subscribers, especially these fine folks:

General:

Ko Ransom

Diogo Prado

Alex

Dsy

Sue Hopkins fans:

Serxeid

Hato Kenjirou fans:

Elizabeth

Yajima Mirei fans:

Machi-Kurada

Blog Highlights from September

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Weebier: Otakon 2026

My full convention report for Otakon 2026.

Crossing Dimensions: Skyline Serenade (and Seigetsu Stars)

A fun and beautiful event!

The VTuber with Super Robot Spirit: Tsukishiro Cecil
Calliope Mori, Beyond the “Rapping Reaper”

Some thoughts on Myth’s grim reaper on the group’s 6th anniversary.

Kio Shimoku

Spotted Flower Is Coming Back in a New Magazine!!

SPOTTED FLOWER! And I don’t know why, but the words “The babes are back!” keeps popping up in my head.

Kio Shimoku Twitter Highlights September 2026

Also some tweets.

Closing

Because so much of September was devoted to writing about the stuff I attended in August, it ended up being a very VTuber-heavy month as well. I think October will have more anime and manga reviews (as well as hopefully my second and final interview from Otakon 2026), so I expect the balance to not be so lopsided.

That all said, it’s been a wild time in that respect. Between Terra404’s and Amano Nene’s graduations, a new hololive unit, IRyS solo live, and the return of Saba, I’m having all sorts of feelings. So, really, who knows?

Kio Shimoku Twitter Highlights September 2026

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Spotted Flower is back, baby! That and more in this month’s tweets.

Kio finds that with age, the habits he’s developed when drawing can cause issues with balance and proportion, like the position of eyes and the size of the head. Since he does digital art now, he goes back and fixes stuff.

https://twitter.com/kioshimoku1/status/2096578369240641953

A poster from attending the How Do You Like Wednesday? anniversary show.

Spotted Flower is continuing! See this post for more info.

https://twitter.com/kioshimoku1/status/2100957128311841151

Kio ordered some manga at the same time: The Kinks Volume 4 and Under 3 Volumes and 4. However, only The Kinks arrived, which has him a little nervous about the other books.

Kio loves the viciousness of this character in Dekapai Kishi.

Girls und Panzer Episode 9 streamed for free on Youtube. Kio recalls that he liked the episode so much that he actually showed his recording to his editor at the time.

Kio sharing someone’s photos of Chuo University, the visual reference for the college in Genshiken.

Spotted Flower Is Coming Back in a New Magazine!!

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In February of this year, the manga magazine Rakuen: Le Paradis ended its run after seventeen years. With its seasonal schedule and experimental titles by an eclectic collection of authors, Rakuen stood out as a very unusual publication. Among these titles was Kio Shimoku’s Spotted Flower.

However, it was revealed this month that Rakuen is getting a successor! The new magazine, titled Souten: Le Ciel Azur, is retaining the authors published in Rakuen with a new thrice-annual publication schedule of physical issues, while also retaining the posting of supplemental web manga. 

And yes, this includes Spotted Flower! In a few previous Twitter posts, Kio has been talking about doing manuscripts for a mysterious something, and I have to wonder now if this was it.

Souten will be under LEED Publishing, which was founded in the 1970s as an off-shoot of Takao Production, the studio founded by late Golgo 13 author Saito Takao. The Twitter account is the same as the old Rakuen one but under a new name, though it seems old links work just fine.

Kio also commented on Twitter about the news, saying that he drew Chapter 51 expecting it to be the end of Spotted Flower, and put everything he had into it. The continuation can be considered the start of “Chapter 2,” and he’s mentioned that “the limiters are gone.” Given everything we’ve seen so far, this has me excited, nervous, and kind of scared. 

I’m looking forward to what he has in store, especially the saga of Ogino-sensei.

A Cheesy Whopper of a Joke

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In Japan, a double cheeseburger (especially from McDonald’s) is sometimes referred to as a dabuchi—short for daburu chiizubaagaa.

This abbreviation got me thinking recently: Doesn’t dabuchi sound a lot like duì bùqĭ—Mandarin Chinese for “sorry”?

I feel like someone could make a good pun out of this, like “duì bùqĭ, I only have dabuchi.”

Yes, I bothered dedicating a post to trying to form a multi-language pun.