Behind My Hero Academia’s Hawks and Japan’s Shokugan Culture

Hawks My Hero Academia Choco Egg Mini Figure by Furuta

My Hero Academia and the Rise of Hawks

My Hero Academia is the manga by Kohei Horikoshi serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump since July 2014. Set in a world where most people possess superpowers called Quirks, the story follows Izuku Midoriya, a boy born without a Quirk who aims to become the greatest hero. The anime, produced by Bones studio, launched in April 2016 and by the mid-2020s had run for more than six seasons alongside multiple theatrical films. The franchise reaches audiences across North America, Europe, South America, and beyond through official broadcast and streaming.

Hawks — real name Keigo Takami — enters the story meaningfully around volume 18 of the manga (roughly 2018) and gains significant screen presence from the anime’s fourth season in 2019 onward. His Quirk, Fierce Wings, lets him control every feather on his large red wings with precision. His design is immediately recognizable: messy blond hair, oversized red wings, and a yellow bomber jacket with white fur trim worn over a black shirt bearing a yellow circular emblem. Over the course of the series, he climbs the professional hero rankings from second place toward first.

Furuta’s Choco Egg and Japan’s Shokugan Tradition

Shokugan — literally “food toy” — is a category of Japanese collectible rooted in Glico’s practice of including prizes in candy boxes since 1922. Furuta Confectionery, founded in 1952, brought this format into the modern collector era with the Choco Egg line in 1999, debuting with a wildlife animal series that became a cultural phenomenon. Since then, Furuta has produced licensed character figures inside the same egg-shaped chocolate shells for properties including Pokemon, One Piece, and Demon Slayer, among others.

Each Choco Egg holds a small capsule containing a miniature figure in the super-deformed (SD) style — exaggerated proportions, pre-painted, and mounted on a small circular base. Because the packaging is randomized, collecting a specific character like Hawks typically meant buying multiple eggs or a full box. This chance element drives the secondary market for individual figures: once opened, they circulate among collectors seeking a particular character without the lottery.

The My Hero Academia Choco Egg series ran across multiple waves between approximately 2019 and 2022. Hawks’s appearance in the lineup coincides with his rising profile during the anime’s fourth season; the specific wave this figure belongs to has not been confirmed in available documentation.

Why Hawks Resonates With Fans Worldwide

Hawks draws global attention for two distinct reasons. Visually, the combination of vivid red wings and a yellow-and-black costume makes him one of the more striking character designs in the series — one that reads clearly even at the compact SD scale of a Choco Egg figure. Narratively, he occupies a genuinely ambiguous position in the story, working at points as a double agent whose loyalties remain in question. This moral complexity — rare among My Hero Academia’s generally straightforward heroic cast — earned him a devoted following as the series moved into its more layered story arcs.

As a Choco Egg piece, the figure also represents a tradition that international collectors increasingly recognize as distinctively Japanese: everyday candy merchandise sold in convenience stores and supermarkets, never officially distributed outside Japan, that has accumulated a genuine collector following through import channels.