Fujiya Look Crispy Chocolate Snack Assort

When I was a child, I used to anthropomorphize everything. To those who didn't study General Psychology, or washed it all out of their brain with beer after taking the final exam, that means I used to assign human feelings and attributes to inanimate objects. To that end, I'd feel sad for things which were not popular or unwanted. I'd feel guilty when a toy didn't get played with, and this was before "Toy Story" put the notion into people's heads that toys lead animated and interesting lives when their owner isn't around.

Walking around the closest convenience store and its quake-induced-panic-buying decimated shelves, I looked at the sad sacks of unpurchased snacks and felt a little of that old sense of anthropomorphism. I felt bad for the Hello Kitty chocolate-covered puffs that resembled Styrofoam in the cutaway image, and for these bags of Look chocolates. What did they do to be left out of the disaster-induced-hoarding love? Meiji chocolate bars are definitely the teacher's pet of earthquake shoppers. Perhaps Fujiya doesn't inspire notions of soundness and shelf stability. I blame the Fujiya Girl with her lolling tongue and somewhat goggly eyes. Nobody wants to see that in a crisis.

Honestly, I don't know why these were left behind as I'd actually bought a package of the chocolate wafers that make up half of the bag before and liked them. For 100 yen ($1.24), this was a nice portion (18 pieces about the size of an American dime or one-yen coin) of candy for the price and, hey, chocolate! Each is individually wrapped and about a bite unless you're me and then it's two bites because you need a picture of the inside of the candy for your blog.

The main selling point for these is that they've got crispy innards under their layers of milk chocolate, and they do live up to that. The flavor of Fujiya chocolates is rather unique compared to other Japanese chocolates and one that I've come to recognize after sampling other offerings. It's hard to explain what that flavor is, but it's just a hint of a floral chemical taste. It's not offensive, but it is distinctive.

Yes, I had to bite them in half for a cutaway. The chocolate is too thick to cut through them with a knife. It makes for bad pictures, but tasty chocolates!

The candies themselves are pretty run of the mill decent quality consumer level chocolate covered wafer offerings in two varieties: "crepe" (22 calories) and "wafer" (24 calories). In terms of taste, the wafers, which have a tiny sugar wafer inside, have a little more sweetness because of the cream filling. The wafers themselves have a somewhat wheaty and earthy flavor which adds some distinction between the two candies. The "crepe" version has a mild waffle cone flavor going on. Both are mainly about the milk chocolate though.

I am not doing handsprings over these, but I liked them because I adore chocolate-covered crispy things and wafers in particular. I also love milk chocolate. This is not a unique offering or something for connoisseurs who want something that challenges or enlivens the palate. They are a decent pedestrian candy though, and I'd buy them again even if the shelves weren't picked over by quake panic shoppers.