Valentine's Day in Japan

Valentine's Day in Japan

Valentine's Day is a day where women, give candy, chocolate or flowers to people they like. This has become an obligation for many women in Japan. Those who work in offices end up giving chocolates to all their male co-workers, sometimes at significant personal expense. In Japan it would be considered rude not to.

In 1958, a department store in Tokyo first held an original event called "Valentine Sale" to promote their chocolate products in February. Although this creative idea ended in failure - only 3 pieces of chocolate were bought during the event - still, it was an interesting beginning.

Types of Chocolate gifts in Japan

The chocolate given to a co-worker on valentines day is known as "giri-choko" (義理チョコ), from the words giri ("obligation") and "choko", a common short version of "chokor?to" (チョコレート), meaning "chocolate".

Chocolates for someone you love or have a good strong relationship with, is known as honmei-choko

But it is not fair that girls have only the role of giving chocolate on St Valentine's Day. They want to enjoy these scrumptious sweets as well! Therefore, "ToMo Choco" ( which means chocolate of friendship ) started to be exchanged among girls.tomo-choko (友チョコ); tomo means "friend" in Japanese.

What about the girls? White Day in Japan was created

In contrast to valentines white day was established. White day is on march 14th, where men are expected to return the favour to those who gave chocolate to them on valentines day. Most men only give to their girlfriends, or significant others. Originally, the return gift was supposed to be white chocolate or marshmallows; hence "White Day". However, many men give more exotic gifts including, jewlery, or lingerie.