Dracule Mihawk’s Choco Egg Figure and the Shokugan Boom

Dracule Mihawk Choco Egg Bust Figure by Furuta Confectionery

One Piece and the Swordsman at Its Summit

One Piece, created by Eiichiro Oda and serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump since 1997, has become one of the best-selling manga series in history — with over 500 million copies in circulation worldwide as of 2024, a number recognized by Guinness World Records. The anime adaptation began airing on Fuji TV in 1999, and the series has cultivated lasting audiences across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Dracule Mihawk carries unusual weight within that cast for someone who appears relatively rarely. Introduced in the Baratie arc around 1997–1998, he holds the title of World’s Strongest Swordsman and was recognized as one of the Shichibukai — a select group of powerful pirates granted official government sanction. His importance to the story is structural: Roronoa Zoro’s central ambition is to surpass Mihawk, which makes him a permanent measure against which one of the main characters is defined throughout the series.

His appearance reinforces that gravity. A wide-brimmed black hat trimmed with raven feathers, a dark open-front coat in black and purple, a gold cross pendant at his chest, and angular sideburns that frame an angular face — the design reads immediately as someone set apart from the rest of the crew. His sword, Yoru, is a massive Western-style blade with a jet-black edge, ranked among the finest in the series’ internal hierarchy of blades.

Furuta’s Choco Egg and Japan’s Food-Toy Culture

This figure comes from the Choco Egg line produced by Furuta Confectionery, an Osaka-based candy company. The format is straightforward: a hollow chocolate egg contains a sealed capsule, and inside that capsule sits a miniature figure. The chocolate is consumed; the figure is kept. Items sold separately, like this one, are simply figures removed from that packaging.

Furuta launched Choco Egg in 1999 with a wildlife series that attracted significant attention — partly because those animal figures were supervised by Kaiyodo, a studio known for demanding sculpt standards. Anime and character licenses followed, and a One Piece series was produced in the early-to-mid 2000s, a period when the show was generating genuine social phenomenon-level popularity in Japan.

The Choco Egg line belongs to a broader Japanese category called shokugan: snack food sold together with a miniature toy or figure, distributed through convenience stores, supermarkets, and candy shops. Most releases used random packaging — the buyer had no way of knowing which figure was inside until they opened it — which fueled a collector culture focused on completing full sets across an entire series. The late 1990s through the mid-2000s is generally considered the peak of this era, with manufacturers releasing licensed series spanning virtually every popular franchise.

What the Mihawk Bust Packs into a Small Format

The figure itself is a bust — chest upward — cast in PVC and mounted on a circular base with a wood-grain texture. Despite the compact scale, the key visual markers are present: the feathered hat, the cross pendant at his collar, and on the reverse, the cross-guard and pommel of Yoru visible over his shoulder. For a figure originally packed inside a chocolate egg, the character-specific detail holds up.

Because the Choco Egg series was manufactured for the Japanese domestic market, it was not sold abroad through regular retail channels. International One Piece fans looking for merchandise from the franchise’s early years generally encounter these pieces through Japanese secondhand sources or direct exports — the path through which items like this one reach collectors outside Japan today.