Nature Meets Nostalgia in Furuta’s Black Woodpecker Figure

Black Woodpecker Figure from Furuta's Choco Egg Japanese Animal Collection (059C)

The Choco Egg Series and the Shokugan Tradition

Around 1999, Furuta Confectionery — an Osaka-based candy maker — began selling chocolate eggs that concealed a small capsule inside, and inside that capsule, a miniature plastic figure. The line was called Choco Egg, and the format borrowed something from capsule toy machines: you never quite knew which figure you would get until you cracked the shell open. That element of chance, combined with a numbered series designed to be completed, made the line a fixture of Japan’s early-2000s food toy boom.

In Japanese, this category is called shokugan — literally “food toy” — a tradition that stretches back to the 1970s and reached a peak of sculpting quality in the decade that followed. Choco Egg’s Japanese Animal Collection stood out even within that elevated field. Rather than drawing on anime characters or licensed mascots, it depicted real wild species with close attention to anatomy, plumage, and coloring. Every figure came paired with a pink information card listing the animal’s classification and ecological details. The combination gave the series a naturalist character that attracted collectors far outside the usual toy-buying audience.

Japan’s Largest Woodpecker, in Miniature

The subject of this figure is the Black Woodpecker, known in Japanese as the kumagera — literally “bear woodpecker,” a name that reflects both its size and the weight of its presence in the forest. Its scientific name is Dryocopus martius. The bird is the largest woodpecker species in Japan: almost entirely black, with a striking red crown that covers the full head in males and only the rear of the crown in females. It is one of the more visually unmistakable birds in the country’s fauna.

In Japan, the Black Woodpecker lives mainly in the mature mixed forests of Hokkaido, with occasional records from higher-elevation areas of Honshu. Its population is limited enough that the species carries designation as a National Natural Monument under Japanese law — a protected status that reflects its ecological significance. The bird is also known informally as “the forest’s carpenter” for its habit of excavating large cavities in tree trunks, hollows that other forest species later adopt as nesting sites. Outside Japan, the Black Woodpecker ranges across much of Europe and Central Asia, making it a species already familiar to birdwatchers in many parts of the world.

What the Number 059C Tells a Collector

This figure carries the identifier 059C. The number 059 places the Black Woodpecker at least 59 entries into the Japanese Animal Collection’s run, indicating that the series had grown into a substantial catalog by the time this figure was released — presumably sometime in the early-to-mid 2000s, when the line was most active. The letter C is generally understood to denote a variant within a single entry, possibly indicating a small difference in paint or pose, though the exact meaning of variant letters in this series cannot be stated with certainty.

The pink data card included with the figure matters to anyone working through the series systematically. Because Choco Egg was sold as a candy first and a collectible second, figures that have remained with their original card are naturally less common than those that have passed through many hands. The numbered structure of the series also invites a display approach built around sequence — each entry a documented species in a miniature natural history collection, the Black Woodpecker holding its specific place among them.