You buy them because of Momotaro, the boy born from a peach who paid his animal companions in dumplings. The order of events was the other way round. The sweet existed first, and the story was fastened to it afterwards by people who had a product to sell.

It began in the castle town in the 1850s, and from there the accounts diverge. One has the first version red, square and hard, closer to a rice cracker than to anything in the boxes today; another has a domain elder advising the shop to make it soft from the outset, as a sweet fit for the tea ceremony. Either way, the round white kind sold in boxes belongs to the Meiji period. Millet flour, which the name promises, is used by some makers and left out by others.

An older thread runs back to the shrine at Kibitsu, where millet dumplings were handed to worshippers, and the confectioners are said to have taken the idea from there. So the name has a real ancestor, even if the sweet in your hand is only distantly related to it.

During the war with China at the end of the nineteenth century the railway along this coast was carrying troops, and the head of one shop went down to the harbour at Ujina dressed as Momotaro to sell to the soldiers coming home. That is how a local sweet turns into a souvenir. Not by being old, but by standing at a port at the right moment in a good costume.