A quick warning to those who haven’t eaten in the last hour. These lovely illustrations of food in Japan are guaranteed to give you hunger pains, and a yearning for Japan. To be clear, I deliberately worded the title “Food in Japan” rather than “Japanese Food.” There’s a difference. Japanese food is available now in almost every country. This however – from the convenience store packaging and carefully arranged plates to the food trucks – is food in Japan. They were captured and illustrated by Justine Wong, an illustrator based in Toronto who is “cooking, and painting, and eating” her way back to Japan.
In May of 2015 Wong successfully funded an illustrative study of 21 days of eating in Japan. While some choose to photograph their food, Wong documented her meals through hundreds of achingly beautiful watercolor paintings, a sample of which is available in her shop for $10. Over on Lucky Peach she also recently wrote an illustrated guide to how she spent 1 day in Tokyo (spoiler: mostly eating).
If you’re in Toronto, you should definitely go check out her exhibition “21 Days in Japan: An Illustrative Study of Japanese Cuisine” opening on March 24, 2016 and running through April 20. If you can’t make it to the show you can keep up with her work on Instagram.
