Japanese Restaurants Plastic Food Menu Displays

When you visit Japan, you notice that a lot of restaurants, especially in the top floor of department stores, will have a big window displaying most of their dishes made by professinoal food artists.

And even when they don't have a display window then most restaurants typically have display menus showing the items you will be ordering. It makes it a lot easier for visitors to Japan because even if you can't communicate then you just point to what you want.

Here is a video telling more about the Japanese food displays.

I've been fooled before thinking that they put out a sample in the morning to show people because it is meant to look totally real and appetizing. I mean this pretty real to me, but it's not.

I espcially like it when it's some restaurant serving foods that I'm not really familair with and may not fully understand the description written in Japanese. I'm thinking of a Russian restaurant that I went to that only had Japanese and Russian written, but it also had pictures in the menu which gave me a way better idea of what I was ordering.

Below is a ramen shop menu

I know the last time I went back to the States for a visit, and we went out to a Chinese restaurant. It was kind of reverse culture shock only seeing a menu with text only because I've become so accustom to it now. It also took longer to decide foor my kids because I had to explain everything. But here in Japan they typically pick up the menu and are screaming out pretty quickly what they want.

You see it in fast food places, but I've seen shows in the States where they go into help struggling restaurants. And if they had a picture menu they got chastised. I never understood why it's look down upon as shabby and cheap in the West. I think.

The Japanese do it on very high level and if it can be done to look extremely appealing to eat then I'd prefer way more over a drab text menu. Comments or thoughts on why this is?