Explore everyday life in Japan
Everybody knows about Valentine’s Day, but do you know about White Day?
White Day is a Japanese holiday that was created by the chocolate industry in the early 1980s. In Japan, Valentine’s Day is one-directional, meaning that presents (generally chocolate or some other kind of sweet) are only given from women/girls to men/boys. In response to this, a holiday was created for men/boys to return the favor. This day is called White Day, and it is held in Japan one month after Valentine’s Day, on March 14.
While Valentine’s Day does have some romantic undertones in Japan and is often used as a day when girls will reveal their secret crushes and feelings to the fellows of their adoration, increasingly, it seems to be becoming a holiday when women/girls give chocolate to the people in their lives who are important to them. As a result, White Day, while having the same romantic underpinnings as Valentine’s Day, is really more of a day for men/boys to say thank you for the gifts they received.
In this sense, it is very Japanese. In Japan, if someone has given you a present, at some point, you give them a present back. That’s just the way it works.
To give you an idea of how White Day can be celebrated, let me tell you about my White Day preparations this year.
With the help of my wife, I navigated a gift shop last Sunday and bought hand cream and flavored coffee mixes for my mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law. For my niece and her friend (who gave my son a present), I bought chocolates and two pairs of socks. Afterward, my wife did me the favor of putting these gifts in gift bags and, together, we delivered them to each person’s house. In this way, White Day can be something of a formality, a custom that is simply observed and carried out.
That said, I like to try doing something special for my wife on White Day every year, something more in line with America’s Valentine’s Day, which to me, means flowers. Admittedly, it doesn’t always happen, but this year I was able to think of a nice little surprise. In addition to buying her a Starbucks gift card so that she can drink the sakura flavored Frappuccino she has been talking about for the past week, I put my kids to work and we made her a bouquet of flowers made from the handprints of my children.
While my wife loved the gifts, and was incredibly surprised by the flowers, she couldn’t help but notice that the bouquet looked more like a Mother’s Day gift, which is generally celebrated with flowers in Japan (typically carnations), than a romantic White Day gift and thought maybe I had gotten the two holidays confused.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.