Botan Rice Candy

When I was growing up in Santa Monica CA in the 70's, my family used to go to downtown LA and visit Little Tokyo. It is a Japanese community with a temple, shops and traditional Japanese restaurants. One of the highlights of those visits was going to the Japanese toy stores. They had tons of cars, wind-up robots that shot out sparks and cool origami paper. They also carried Botan Rice Candy.
Botan is a slightly sticky, orange-flavored candy with two wrappers. The outside wrapper is plastic but the inside wrapper is made from clear rice paper. It looks like plastic but dissolves in your mouth. Each box used to come with a tiny plastic toy (like a car or plane) but now come with stickers. During our recent trip to DisneyWorld, my family and I visited the Mitsukoshi Department Store in the Japanese Pavilion at EPCOT. After looking around for a bit, I saw that they had Botan and bought a couple of boxes. The candy was a hit with the girls once they got past the weird texture of the rice paper. They pretty much finished both boxes on the spot. I can get Botan in Austin but it felt a little different buying it at Mitsukoshi.