Valentine's Day: Why women should give the chocolates
Date
February 13, 2013
Category
Opinion
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Alan Stokes
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"It's a rare chance for the females of Japan to express their feelings." Photo: Reuters
Rieko is my dream. She's the sort of woman who sees in me what others can't. She writes me poetry and sends me sweet gifts. She reassures me that, for all my faults, I've still got whatever it was that I used to have and that wasn't much anyway so I need to accept whatever excitement comes my way.
And that's Rieko.
Like all shy Japanese women, Rieko will be giving chocolates to many men tomorrow, on Valentine's Day. It's a rare chance for the females of Japan to express their innermost feelings.
You see, only women send Valentine's gifts in Japan.
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But since the Western celebration took hold in the late 1950s, Japanese teenage girls and later young women have developed a clever system of giving different quality chocolates according to the type of man involved.
For a lover-boy like me, Rieko would direct honmei - ''potential winner'' - chocolates, not unlike those an Australian man would give a female he liked romantically. Kyodo News reports the average outlay on these ''true love'' chocolates in Japan will be ¥3497 ($36) this year. Should the lucky man approve, he'll return in kind with gifts worth up to three times as much on White Day on March 14.
But office ladies such as Rieko will also give non-romantic chocolates tomorrow. For boring, unhelpful workmates and superiors, she will give giri-choco, otherwise known as obligation chocolates. The average Tokyo office lady will buy 10.4 boxes of them this year, according to the Printemps department store in Ginza. Many will purchase ''Black Thunder'' brand giri-choco through vending machines at Tokyo subway stations.
For the really annoying obnoxious, hairless, brown-suited, deranged chick magnet wannabe, though, Japanese women will buy cho-giri choco, also known as ultra-obligation chocolates.
Luckily, the no-hopers who receive giri and cho-giri chocolates aren't expected to reciprocate. To do so would be very awkward indeed.
Researchers say Japan's peculiar woman-only gift-giving on Valentine's Day reflects two national traits.
One is a mother-son psychological bonding between Japanese women and their husbands. In the 1970s, psychoanalyst Takeo Doi famously identified this sense of ''amae'' - the state of expecting a close other's indulgence when one behaves inappropriately. Get drunk, sing bad karaoke and chuck up on the lounge - an Australian wife's nightmare, but theoretically excused by Japanese women.
Amae isn't immediately clear in Valentine's Day in Japan because when women give men ''potential winner'' chocolates they seem to be taking the ''you go girl'' initiative. In reality, the theory goes, they are feeding the male need for unconditional maternal-style love, the so-called ''my mouth is lonely'' dependency. Women accept it because the molly-coddling gives them some power over their man. And research suggest this symbiotic relationship works to keep couples together.
The darker side of Valentine's in Japan is clearer when it comes to obligation chocolates. The theory is they reflect a female's lower place in the Japanese social/workplace pecking order. In 1993, Canadian anthropologist Millie Creighton noted that if the chocolate ritual had been introduced directly as a Western-style mutual exchange of gifts, ''it would never have caught on because the men would never have gotten involved, and if the men had not, the women would have been too embarrassed to do so''.
Creighton concludes any individualism in chocolate giving by Japanese women ''has largely been replaced by the, albeit playful, entry of giri (obligation) into the practice, and by the symbolic affirmation of 'sweet' dependency relationships''.
Personally, I just want Rieko to send me some chocolates.
Truth is, I can be sure she will, as long as I pay $6 plus postage to the owners of the Japanese website that invented Rieko as a Valentine's Day insurance policy for blokes who fear the embarrassment of not receiving any chocolates.
The chocs turn up at your office with a note saying ''from a woman named Rieko''.
Such is life …
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Read more:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/valen...-chocolates-20130212-2eb0b.html#ixzz2KjBCN18e
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