Lake Biwa’s Endangered Catfish in Furuta’s Choco Egg Series

Furuta Choco Egg Japan Animal Collection — Giant Lake Biwa Catfish (Item 047C)

The Candy-Toy Series That Made Adults Queue at Convenience Stores

Choco Egg is a chocolate line from Osaka-based Furuta Confectionery Co., Ltd., built around an egg-shaped chocolate shell that conceals a miniature figure inside. The Japan Animal Collection sub-series launched in 1999 and quickly outgrew its original children’s audience: adult shoppers — naturalists, biologists, and figure enthusiasts — began turning up at convenience stores in search of specific specimens. The reason was quality. Kaiyodo, the Osaka-based studio respected worldwide for its precision sculpting on resin figures and museum display models, handled the creature designs for the series. Their involvement raised the standard of biological accuracy well beyond what was typical for a candy-aisle product.

Each figure came paired with a printed data card listing taxonomic classification, body-length information, and other natural history notes — giving the series the feel of a pocket field guide. Item 047C sits in the middle-to-later range of the multi-wave release run. The “C” designation may indicate a color variant, though that cannot be confirmed with certainty.

The Giant Catfish Found Only in Lake Biwa

The subject of this figure is Silurus biwaensis — the Biwako Onama zu, or Giant Lake Biwa Catfish. This species exists nowhere else on Earth: its entire range is Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture, Japan’s largest freshwater lake. Adults can reach approximately one meter in length, making it the largest catfish found in Japan. It belongs to the order Siluriformes, family Siluridae.

Lake Biwa supports an unusual concentration of endemic species — the isaza, biwamasu, and honmoroko among them — and the Biwako Onama zu is one of the lake’s most distinctive inhabitants. Japan’s Environment Ministry Red List classifies the species as Endangered (Category IB, equivalent to EN on the IUCN scale), with bank reinforcement work and the spread of non-native fish cited as ongoing threats to its habitat.

Why Naturalist and Figure Collectors Take Notice

Kaiyodo’s name carries genuine weight in international collecting circles, and its involvement in the Japan Animal Collection is well documented in toy guides and period media. The subject matter — a lake-locked, endangered endemic — occupies a corner of natural history that very few collectibles have ever addressed. The data card, printed in Japanese, includes the Latin binomial and taxonomic details that remain legible to anyone familiar with biological classification, regardless of language.

The series also holds a significant early position in the history of blind-packaged collectibles. The random-assortment, series-completion format it popularized in Japan during the late 1990s and early 2000s anticipated the model that global art-toy brands would later adopt on a large scale. Because the Japan Animal Collection circulated exclusively through Japanese retail candy channels, it never reached primary markets overseas — a structural fact that made individual figures difficult to acquire internationally from the outset.