Komatsuya Bug Candy: Artisan Chocolate Beetles from Akita

Komatsuya Honten is a confectionery shop in Yokote, Akita Prefecture — a small city in northern Japan known for its kamakura snow festivals and its beetle collecting culture. The company president grew up catching kabuto-mushi (rhinoceros beetles) in Yokote's surrounding forests. In 2005, he started making them out of chocolate.

The beetles are dark chocolate cake enrobed in dark chocolate, with dried squid dipped in chocolate for legs and horns, and orange peel for mandibles. The larvae are milk chocolate with corn flakes embedded for texture, coated in white chocolate skin, with dried squid legs as tiny appendages and orange peel mouths. The beehive cakes hide smaller insect candies inside a honey-flavoured shell.

Production capacity was roughly 500 units per day when the candy went viral on Yahoo Japan and 2channel on January 19, 2008. Orders overwhelmed the small operation. The Japan Times covered the story under the headline "Chocolate bugs a fright and delight." The candies became a perennial Valentine's Day novelty — in a country where women gift chocolate to men on February 14th, a box of realistic chocolate beetles is both technically correct and deeply wrong.

What separates Komatsuya's insects from novelty candy elsewhere is the craftsmanship. These are not gummy worms or plastic-mould chocolates. The squid-leg appendages have the right segmented texture. The corn-flake larvae have the right grub-like translucency under the white chocolate. The dark chocolate beetles have the right sheen. The objects are accurate enough to trigger genuine discomfort, which is — in the grotesque-cute tradition — exactly the point.