Present Mic and the Food-Toy Tradition That Made Him Tiny

Present Mic — Furuta Choco Egg, My Hero Academia Part 2

A Food-Toy Figure from My Hero Academia

This is a hard plastic mini figure of Present Mic, produced by Furuta Confectionery as No. 13 in the “My Hero Academia Part 2” Choco Egg set. It is the last numbered entry in a lineup of thirteen standard figures — followed only by a secret variant — and requires a small amount of assembly before mounting on its oval black base. Like all Choco Egg figures, it originally came sealed inside blind packaging alongside chocolate candy, sold through Japanese convenience stores and supermarkets rather than specialty toy shops.

Present Mic: UA High’s English Teacher and DJ Hero

Present Mic’s real name is Yamada Hizashi. He teaches English at UA High School and doubles as a late-night radio DJ — a pairing that suits his loudly enthusiastic personality. His Quirk, called “Voice,” lets him amplify his own vocal output to extreme volumes and direct it with precision. The large vocal enhancement device fixed at his neck is central to his hero costume, and the figure reproduces it faithfully, along with his most recognizable features: an extreme spike of yellow hair swept sharply backward, grey goggles, headphones, and a black suit. The figure captures him in a characteristic wide-armed DJ stance.

Within the series, Present Mic is a supporting character — an old friend and colleague of Aizawa Shota (Eraserhead) — rather than one of the leads. His personality and design have nonetheless earned him a strong following internationally. He is a recurring subject of cosplay and fan art, and both his Japanese voice actor (Inada Tetsu) and his English voice actor (Christopher Wehkamp) have contributed to his recognition outside Japan.

My Hero Academia was created by Horikoshi Kohei and began serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump in July 2014. The anime, produced by BONES, launched in April 2016. The series follows Midoriya Izuku, a boy born without a Quirk in a society where superhuman abilities are the norm, as he works toward becoming a hero. It became one of the defining anime franchises of the late 2010s, building a large fanbase across North America, Europe, and Latin America through its international simulcast.

Choco Egg and Japan’s Shokugan Tradition

Furuta Confectionery, headquartered in Osaka, launched the Choco Egg line in 1999. The format pairs a small figure with a chocolate or candy product in sealed blind packaging — the buyer does not know which character is inside until it is opened. Furuta began with animals and natural history subjects, building a reputation for sculpting detail at a small scale, before expanding into licensed anime properties. The My Hero Academia sets, of which Part 2 is the second release, are believed to date from roughly the late 2010s to early 2020s, though the exact release date has not been confirmed.

The broader category these figures belong to is shokugan, a contraction of the Japanese words for “food” and “toy.” Shokugan is a format almost entirely specific to Japan, distributed through everyday retail channels rather than specialist hobby shops. The randomized packaging creates a collecting dynamic that has sustained an active secondary market for individual figures. For buyers outside Japan, that dynamic carries an added dimension: shokugan items were never designed for export, and once a series sells through, they circulate only through the secondhand market — making each one a small piece of a retail culture that does not quite exist anywhere else.