Kitty-chans representing the Showa, Heisei, and Reiwa eras are waiting inside these sweet treats.
Japanese candymaker Furuta seems pretty upfront with the name of its Choco Egg sweets, as they’re chocolates shaped and sized like the eggs you’d find in supermarket. However, there’s a key piece of information missing from the Choco Egg name, which is that inside of each egg is a toy.
Making the contents of a Choco Egg all the more important to be aware of is that these aren’t generic little trinkets, but collaborations with some of Japan’s most beloved characters, Choco Egg has often teamed up with Nintendo, releasing sweets containing figures from the Kirby, Super Mario, and Animal Crossing series, and now they’re partnered with yet another superstar of the Japanese pop culture world: Hello Kitty!
As soon as we saw the Choco Egg Hello Kitty Collection, we knew there was no way we were going to limit ourselves to just one, so instead we went out and bought ourselves a whole shelf box, giving us 10 Choco Eggs.
▼ Since each Choco Egg is just 280 yen (US$1.85), this is a luxury we could afford to treat ourselves to.
There are a total of 15 possible designs, representing the three Japanese eras that Kitty-chan’s career has spanned so far: Showa (technically 1926 to 1989, but most commonly associated with the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s in a pop culture sense), Heisei (1989-2019), and Reiwa (2019-present).
Curious to see where on the timeline our figures fell, we cracked open our first Choco Egg, revealing the toy canister inside, which we opened up to find…
…a Monster Hunter Hello Kitty, saluting the mega popular Capcom video game series that got its start on the most popular video game platform of the Heisei era, the PlayStation 2, in 2004.
▼ Hello Kitty is dressed as a Palico, Monster Hunter’s helper felines/pudding muses.
Next stop…
…the Reiwa period, with this Kitty flashing a pair of “finger hearts,” the social media photo pose of the moment among fashionable young ladies in Japan where you cross the tips of your thumbs and index fingers to make little hearts out of them.
For Choco Egg number three, we went all the way back to not only the Showa period, but the very start of Hello Kitty…
…with a figure in which she’s wearing an outfit and sitting in a style similar to her debut illustration from 1974.
▼ Three Choco Egg Hello Kitties, three periods of Japanese history
We stuck around the Showa period a little longer with our next figure, Hello Kitty cosplaying as iconic anime/manga character Chibi Maruko-chan, who burst onto the scene in 1986 and remains a big part of family entertainment in Japan to this day.
Also in our set were three different Holly Kitty idol singers, with the one for the Showa era sporting a hairdo with the sort of wavy bangs megastar idol Seiko Matsuda made famous in her heyday of the early ‘80s.
The Heisei idol is dressed in the sort of frills and checked pattern made famous by AKB48 at the height of their popularity…
…and the Reiwa idol shifts to a more contemporary “it girl” look, though you could also argue there’s a dash of late’90s influence coming back in as it becomes retro cool.
There was even more musical theming going on in our next two Choco Eggs, both of which contained…
…Matsuken Hello Kitties, with the unmistakable shining gold kimono and top knot of actor/singer Ken Matsudaira, whose bombastic performance in videos and on-stage for the song “Matsuken Samba” in 2004 cemented his position in Japanese entertainment history.
The appearance of a duplicate might seem like a scam, but it’s important to remember that the box of 10 Choco Eggs we purchased wasn’t billed as a complete set with one of each possible figure (there’s no way it could be, since there are 15 figures in total, but only 10 Choco Eggs in the shelf box we bought).
Moving on to our last Choco Egg, we took one more trip to the Showa era with…
…the Honda Hello Kitty.
Today, Honda might be known in many countries, particularly in North America and Wester Europe, as a car manufacturer, but they got their start selling scooters and motorcycles. The Honda Super Cub originally went on sale in 1958, and though the design has been updated several times since, Honda still sells Super Cubs today. It’s particularly famous for being Honda’s big break into the global market and the associated ad campaigns which promised “You meet the nicest people on a Honda,” a deliberate attempt to shift the image of motorcycles away from transportation for delinquent gangs and toward a symbol of fun freedom (and who would ever argue that Hello Kitty isn’t nice?).
Now that we’d freed all 10 of our Hello Kitties from the confines of their Choco Eggs, it was time, of course, to play with them.
▼ Need a ride, Chibi Maruko-chan Kitty-chan?
If you’re wondering which Hello Kitties we’re missing, for the Showa era we’re yet to find rotary phone Hello Kitty. Missing from our Heisei lineup are Suntanned Gyaru Kitty and Puyo Puyo video game Kitty. Finally, to assemble a complete set, we’d still need the Reiwa period’s Solo Camping Kitty, Oshi no Ko anime Kitty, and Kazlaser comedian Kitty.
So if anyone has one of those figures and wants to trade it for our spare Matsuken Kitty, let us know and we’ll see if we can work something out. Act fast enough…
…and maybe we’ll even still have some leftover chocolate to share with you too.
Related: Choco Egg Hello Kitty Collection press release
Photos ©SoraNews24
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