This is one part of my Valentine Day haul, chocolate from the Delightful Miss E. I will of course receive more, and got some more before the actual day. This is because Valentine Day in Japan is not a festival if mutual affection and dating, but a cunnibg marketing scheme concocted by the faceless men of Big Chocolate.
And as a marketing scheme it is of unparalleled wickedness, corrupting the western dating element and melding it to Japanese concepts of obligation and group membership – then targeting the whole thing exclusively at women to make sure the meme manifests as fantastic profits. I love it for its sublime union of evil and chocolate.
You see, in Japan Valentine Day has been reconstrued as a day for women to give chocolate to men, starting with their lovers and proceeding through all the men in key positions in their life: family, friends, club members, colleagues, even their boss and teachers. This last set of recipients reflect the women’s oblugations to men who have helped her during the year, and is referred to as giri choco. By this point most women are so deep in chocolate that they give to female friends too.
As an example of the reach of this ritual, on saturday I went to see the band ElupiA, and their singer gave me chocolate just to show her appreciation for my support.
What’s not to love about Valentine Day in Japan? Just one thing: i have to repay the lot on White Day, March 15th. As I said, it’s a wicked scheme…
Compromise and Conceit 
February 15, 2012 at 11:27 am
My beloved and her younger progeny did well out of the Valentine’s chocolates in Fukuyama.
They gave me some very rich-looking, home-made chocolates at dinner.
And then they ate them for me.
February 15, 2012 at 11:36 am
That’s cruel! Actually I have a funny story of a friend, Miss K, who prepared a range of Valentine’s Day chocolates for a new guy she was trying to reel in. She arranged a date for the evening of the 14th but he cancelled in the afternoon “due to work.” So in a fit of pique she stormed home and ate all the chocolates she’d intended to give him. The next day, she had a huge outbreak of pimples.
Always this is the way with Miss K – her impulsive anger at the behaviour of boys leads her to rash acts she later regrets. The worst was the time she discovered a boy she was dating had a girlfriend, so she went to a shrine and offered up a prayer for them to break up. Since that day her love life has been a shambles and she blames it on the rash act of trying to conjure an evil curse from a normal shrine.
February 15, 2012 at 6:20 pm
You misspelt “obligations”.
February 15, 2012 at 6:31 pm
That’s because i wrote this post on my new smartphone. And this comment. Here at the Faustus school of Evilness we focus on productivity: quantity over quality! Unlike the average victim of this ponzi-scheme-in-chocolate: my belly can testify to the Japanese woman’s commitment to quality and quantity.