Kawaguchi Mikan Chan Mandarin Candy

Mikan-chan is shaped like a peeled mandarin.

Not a slice, not a disc — the whole fruit with the skin off, segments and all, rendered as a ring of hard candy with a hole through the middle.

Kawaguchi Seika has been making it since the 1960s and it is the original of what is now an eight-strong family of -chan candies, each one a fruit with a cute face drawn on the bag.

The mandarin came first and remains the biggest piece in the range.

The company is in Wakayama, which matters.

Wakayama grows more mandarins than any other prefecture in Japan — the warm Kii Peninsula coast has been citrus country for centuries — and Kawaguchi puts Wakayama mandarin juice into the candy rather than relying on flavouring alone.

Japanese reviewers describe the result as honest rather than intense: a clear, gentle mandarin that tastes like the fruit instead of like orange soda, finishing clean with none of the cloying aftertaste hard candy often leaves.

It is a soboku flavour, to use the Japanese word — plain, unadorned, and better for it.

Mikan in Japan is winter.

Households buy them by the cardboard box, keep them under the kotatsu table, and work through them all season; the fruit is so bound up with the season that a bowl of mandarins is shorthand for a Japanese winter evening.

Mikan-chan borrows all of that. Individually wrapped in a 124 g bag, the supermarket size rather than the 100-yen-shop one.

It is also sold through Daiso, which is where most people outside Japan are likeliest to have seen it.

About this item
Item Name : Mikan Chan
Brand : Kawaguchi Seika
Item Form : Candy
Number of Items : 124g (Pack of 1)