Japanese festival food: chocolate covered strawberries

In recent years I've been seeing more and more chocolate covered or chocolate dipped strawberries available at food stalls at Japanese festivals. Last summer, my youngest tried one. It wasn't the ideal season to try some. For one, summer is not strawberry season. In Japan strawberry season is from January to May on average. Moreover, because it was so hot the chocolate melted quickly and they didn't taste good when the product got warm.

In the twenty plus years that I have been in Japan, choco bananas (bananas covered in chocolate) have been a common food stall at Japanese festivals. But I only started noticing the chocolate covered strawberries in recent years. Now, they may have been around twenty years ago and I just didn't notice them. The choco bananas are much more eye catching the way they line them up. But the choco strawberries aren't displayed in the same way.

I do find it interesting that in Japanese the "choco" comes before the word banana for the chocolate covered bananas. But for the strawberries ones, the "choco" comes second and it is ichigo choco いちごチョコ. Ichigo いちご is the Japanese for strawberry and choco チョコ is the word for chocolate.

When you buy a choco banana it is one banana on a stick. But strawberries are smaller so they often sell them differently. I have seen them been sold as one on a stick. But you can also get more than one. For example, when we bought it for my daughter it was three strawberries, on sticks, in a plastic cup. It was 500 yen, which wasn't too bad I suppose.

Hers was quite basic, literally just strawberries covered in a thin layer of chocolate. But I have seen more elaborate ones, where they use really thick flavored chocolate with decorations too. Have you seen any really elaborate ones? Have you ever tried chocolate dipped / covered strawberries at a festival in Japan?