White Day

Japan is big on the gift giving culture. I don't know how important it is to get things 'just right' when it comes to the type of gift, but certainly as a foreigner you're given a lot more leeway. Which is nice when you're an idiot, like me.

Valentine's Day in Japan is a marketeer's dream. Although only women give chocolate, not only do they give chocolate to their boyfriend or someone they're interested in (honmei-choco), they also give 'obligation chocolate' to their coworkers (giri-choco) and these days lots of people (my girl students did this loads) give chocolate to their friends (tomo-choco.)

Then, a month later, on 'White Day' (March 14th), guys who recieved chocolate have to reciprocate, and in a genius feat of marketing, the tradition is that they give more expensive chocolates than those they recieved.

On Valentine's day at work, I got some giri-choco, 2 fantastic little boxes of chocolate from the student teacher and the office lady, a little collection of chocs from the nurse and two individual chocolates from one of the English teachers who went round giving them to everyone. This threw up some interesting questions: am I supposed to get the same thing in return for the English teacher who gave me two little Quality Street equivalents as the student teacher who gave me an amazing box of multi coloured macha, azuki and kurogoma chocolates from Kyoto? The English teacher is the student teacher's superior so should I take that into account? They sit next to each other so I wondered what to do.

In the end, this was all solved as I forgot about White Day until 8.40pm on March 13th, and the supermarkets close at 9. Rushing to one, all they had left was some cheap looking Disney chocolate (I really DO NOT understand why the hell Japan likes Disney so much...) so I rushed to the other one. Sorry guys, I loved your chocolate, but you get a box of strange sesame seed cookies that are for people who are lactose intolerant or something. At least they cost a bit and came in great packing. Hopefully that'll count for something.