Valentine's Day Japanese Style

Today is Valentine’s Day in Japan and they have borrowed from the U.S. the idea of giving chocolate to celebrate… but with a twist. In Japan, women give chocolate to men for Valentine’s Day, but not vice versa. And the women give chocolate, not to their husbands or sweethearts (though they may give it to them too for all I know), but to the men in their workplace. So you buy chocolate for your section head, department head, etc. The Japanese call it giri choco ‘duty chocolate’ (giri pronounced gear-y to rhyme with O’Leary).

Yuko Ogasawara has written a wonderful book called Office Ladies, Salaried Men looking at gender and power dynamics in the Japanese workplace. She has a whole chapter on the Valentine’s chocolates in which she points out that men’s workplace prestige is influenced by how much chocolate they get on Valentine’s Day. So low-ranking female office workers can punish superiors whom they dislike by giving them smaller boxes of chocolate than the other guys. She even describes one woman who hated her boss so much that she pounded on the chocolate to break it into pieces before she gave it to him.

The other irony of all this is that part of the image of Japanese masculinity is that they don’t like sweets—they like masculine things like whisky. So here are all these guys stuck with a bunch of chocolate they don’t even want. Or perhaps there are Japanese men who secretly, beneath that “tough guy” exterior, actually do like chocolate and get to indulge once a year.

So Happy Valentine’s Day and a reminder to all those American guys that your wife/girlfriend/significant other really does want you to buy her a box of chocolate. Maybe it’s giri choco in the U.S. too.