Crunky chocolate bar, a Japanese original?

Over at ROK Drop and Japan Probe there is a discussion on the supposed propensity for Koreans to copy Japanese products.

I've written on this in the past, but the upshot is this:

• This has been a chronic problem in Korea that still lingers (but to a much smaller degree than before). In the past most of the copied products were not sold in Korea at all, so represented no real loss to the Japanese (or other countries') business, but now, even though it's a much smaller problem, the potential losses may be more acute. 

• Many of the examples provided, however, have actually been legitimately licensed copies, owing to a number of commercial partnerships across the Tsushima Strait (Otsuka Pharmaceuticals in particular has its fingers in many pots in Korea).

• In many respects, some Japanese companies are no better. Witness the case of Nara Dreamland or the Crunky chocolate bar. In fact, for the longest time I thought it was a Korean company that had done the Nestle Crunch knockoff, but it was a Japanese one (Lotte Japan, that is, though one could argue it's as much a Korean company as Japanese). 

I snapped the picture of the Crunky bar just a few weeks ago in the Ala Moana branch of the Nijiya Supermarket, which has some killer Hiroshimayaki.

Anyway, this would be a more interesting topic if it hadn't come to be dominated by Korea bashers (much the same as what happened with my post on the Corea and Korea spellings).

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