White Day: The Anti-Valentines

Valentine’s Day has always been the scourge of single people. A holiday invented by card companies and diamond cartels in order to get you to spend all your money on gifts on little heart-shaped gifts. Japan is much the same way, only they took it one step further. Why have one manufactured holiday when you can have two?

That second day is White Day, which happens every March 14th in Japan. Where as Valentines Day is the day women give men chocolate, the less popular and less observed White Day is where men can repay their female friends for their kindness.

How manufactured is it?

It was only in 1978, more than 10 years after Valentines Day had become a part of Japanese life, that the 3rd generation owner of Fukuoka City’s Ishimura Manseido (石村萬盛堂) Confectionery Shop asked the same question in a letter to the editor of a women’s magazine. Why was there no OKAESHI for the gifts given on Valentine’s Day? He recommended that marshmallows be a feature of any sweet given on the day that he suggested be called Marshmallow Day. It was not until the next year that a group of confectioners got together to promote this new idea, and came up with the name White Day.

In June 1979, a meeting of the the All Japan Sweets and Confectionery Makers Union (全国飴菓子工業同組合) convened in Nagoya and decided to go ahead with a White Day Campaign, which would be implemented in 1981.

The advertising campaign was a big success in the first year, with excellent sales for many of the products which were promoted. For the next 4 years, however, things went downhill. By the fifth year of White Day campaigning, the group of organizers was ready to call it quits. They decided to make one last effort.

That’s how manufactured. Read more about White Day and how evil it is over at alientimes.com. Just be happy this holiday hasn’t made the journey West yet…