Valentine's Day chocolate Period COrigin theory CVerified

February in the shop windows

In Japan, Valentine's Day means 14 February, the day on which women give chocolate to men. This form of the day is said to have become widespread in the 1970s. Yet the effort to sell 14 February as a day for gifts began some twenty years earlier, in the 1950s, among Western-style confectioners and department stores. Further back still, an account has come down from prewar Kobe of a confectioner advertising Valentine chocolates in an English-language newspaper aimed at foreign residents.

February is a slow month for sweets, and the confectioners needed a promotion to fill the gap. Their eyes fell on 14 February, St Valentine's Day. Confectioners in Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe held a joint Valentine festival; in Tokyo, confectionery makers and patisseries tried sales of their own, one shop at a time; and department stores advertised Valentine sales in the newspapers.

How chocolate took centre stage

At first the goods on offer were cakes, cards and gifts of every kind, and chocolate was only one of them. It was in the 1970s, it is said, that chocolate stood out from the other gifts as the main one and settled into the form of a present from women to men.

The version told most often is set in Tokyo in 1958. That February, Kunio Hara of Mary Chocolate held a Valentine sale at the Isetan department store in Shinjuku, and in three days, it is said, sold just five bars of chocolate and five cards. The company's own history also records that in February 1958 it held "the first Valentine sale, at a department store in Tokyo." In time the story spread as "the first Valentine sale in Japan."

The 1958 sale itself has not been refuted. What does not fit is one point only: that it was the first in Japan. The April 1952 issue of the confectionery trade journal Seika Seipan is reported to carry an item on cakes put on sale for St Valentine's Day on 14 February (called there aijin no hi, the day of sweethearts). The magazine Shakaijin, in its April 1955 issue, is said to have written that on 14 February that year a "Valentine sale" had appeared in Tokyo's Ginza as a new selling tactic, though it did little more than make passers-by stop and look. According to the religious studies scholar Kenji Ishii, the Asahi Shimbun of 9 February 1956 carried an advertisement from the Seibu department store for a storewide Valentine sale under the line "Give a gift to someone you love and respect."

In the Kansai region, the confectioners had gone further and joined forces. An article by Kaneko (金子嘉正) in the January 1957 issue of Seika Seipan is said to describe a joint Valentine festival held by the Western-style confectioners of Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe, and to state that one shop had already run this kind of sale after the war, in 1951. The same journal in 1959 is said to have noted that the confectionery trade of the three cities had already been putting its efforts into the Valentine festival for six years. The Isetan sale came after promotions like these had begun in both the east and the west of the country.

Other accounts reach further back. Morozoff, a Western-style confectioner in Kobe, writes in its own account that it introduced Valentine chocolates in 1932 and in February 1935 placed a Valentine advertisement in the English-language newspaper the Japan Advertiser. According to the Japan Chocolate and Cocoa Association's explanation, on 12 February 1936 Morozoff ran an advertisement for Valentine's Day chocolates in an English-language newspaper published in Kobe for foreign residents, and a 2019 article on Bunshun Online gives the wording of the 1936 advertisement as "For Your VALENTINE Make A Present of Morozoff's FANCY BOX CHOCOLATES". By 1936 at the latest, then, a Kobe shop was recommending chocolate as a Valentine gift. That does not mean the custom began in that year. The advertisement's readers were foreigners living in Japan, and no source has been put forward showing a line from there to the postwar promotions. Kenji Ishii holds that the ventures of Morozoff and of Mary Chocolate were, at first, complete failures.

Some take a newspaper advertisement placed by the confectionery maker Morinaga in February 1960 as the start of commercial Valentine advertising. Against this, Kenji Ishii writes that if one goes through postwar newspaper advertisements in order of date, picking out the words "Valentine's Day", the claims made so far turn out to be not entirely correct, and he points to department store advertisements from 1956. Kaneko's 1957 article in the trade journal is also said to state that in Tokyo some five or six shops, among them Morinaga, Fujiya and Colombin, had each held sales on their own without making much of a mark. On that account, Morinaga was already running Valentine sales in Tokyo before its 1960 advertisement.

There is also the view that Valentine chocolate took root because the confectioners advertised it. The trade journals of the 1950s are said to have urged shops to take up the promotion. Kaneko's 1957 article says that the journal had been advocating the sale for five or six years, and the trade magazine Shōgyōkai, in March 1956, is said to have written that the Valentine's Day sales tactics of the previous year or so were not yet anything showy, and were still at the stage of making the day's origins and meaning widely known. Kenji Ishii, on the other hand, argues that attempts to sell gifts other than chocolate began to fail from around 1968, and that the custom spread as consumers themselves chose chocolate from among the many possible presents; on that basis he disputes the view that it was established by the traders' sales tactics alone. On whether the sellers' push or the buyers' choice counted for more, the two views still stand side by side.

Several companies claim to be the originator. The Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun of 12 August 1985, quoted in the 2019 Bunshun Online article, wrote that "the rivalry over who came first is so fierce that the origin is unclear." In the 1950s many promotions ran side by side in shops in the east and west of the country, and it was out of these overlapping efforts that the form of women giving chocolate to men is said to have settled in the 1970s. No single company can be named as the one that began the custom.