I found this sweet mold (okashikata) many years ago in northern Japan in an "old school" junk shop. I've only seen one other with bats which hang inside a noted sweet shop on Shijo Street in Kyoto. Bats, in a tradition adopted from China, are a symbol of good fortune. In Chinese the word for bat is a homonym with the word for good fortune, and their love of rebus has resulted in bats being put on almost everything from imperial textiles to the cheap plastic dishes at that "Chinese-American" restaurant you stopped at in Casper, Wyoming.
