You can’t go anywhere in Tokyo at this time of year without running into people buying Valentine Day Chocolates. They are everywhere. The economy might be taking a hit, but the chocolate manufacturers are certainly making the most of this Valentine season. Here are some quick shots of a few offerings to tide you over until the 14th.
Godiva Chocolates
These bag styled chocolates are cute!
Chocolate cookies
The display cases are always well presented
and in Shibuya where I could not even see the chocolates for the crowd
Morinaga have decided in order to boost the sales of chocolates around the Valentine Day period, they are going to encourage men to start giving chocolate to women, rather than just having the women spending all the cash. They have launched a Gyaku-choco campaign for their chocolates and have produced a number of tv commercials already promoting it.
Survey
In a survey they conducted in January this year covering ages from 10 – 50 years, taking in 400 men and 400 women, they concluded the following:
1. That men think it would be ok to give chocolates to women on valentines day and that if the women threw in a quick “Choco, Hoshii-na!!” (チョコ、欲しいな～）then 90.8% of the men would give them chocolate. I am surprised they didn’t ask the men what else they might want to give the women as a follow up question.
2. 98.3% of the women said if they received chocolate from men they would be happy. 66.7% said they would feel the men were paying attention, 44.3% thought it would be great or fashionable (素敵）.
3. When asked if they would think of the male giver of chocolate as someone of the opposite sex, i.e. view them as a male, 20% said yes and 57.5% said “probably, depending on the person”, which Morinaga use as their headline to say
“close to 80% of women would view men giving them chocolates as romantic.”
Statistics don’t lie, but Morinaga might be jumping to large conclusions on this one.
Gyaku-Choco (逆チョコ）
The exchange of Chocolate from Men to Women rather then Women to Men is being called Gyaku-Choco (逆チョコ）. The survey suggests the name for a guy giving chocolate to a girl should be Chokomen (チョコメン) after the phrase Ikemen (イケメン).
Here are 3 chocolate products that Morinaga have brought out in their Gyaku-Choco series. Note the writing of the product name etc is backwards.
Morinaga's Gyaku-choco series (pix from Morinaga website)
What about White Day?
Back to the survey, here is the best part; while traditionally White Day was established to get the men to buy something in return for the women after they receive their chocolates on Valentines Day, the survey says 70% of the men think they should get something in return if they give chocolates and 90% of the women said they would consider giving something in return. The moral of the survey seems to be that you have to give to get.
For men giving to women, the average cost of chocolate to be given to a true love was surveyed at 1,672 Yen, whilst chocolate given to others was around 600 Yen. For women giving to men the figure was 1,714 Yen versus 542 Yen.
TV Commercial
Here is a video clip of the latest Morinaga CM for Valentines Day
Quick Poll
What do you think about the chocolate situation on Valentines Day?
I wrote a follow up piece on Valentines Day. Click here to read it.
UFO catchers have been around for ages and they never seem to go out of fashion at Japanese game centers. At a local Game Center in Shibuya the UFO catchers are already geared up for Valentines Day with a combination of advertising for the 30th anniversary of space invaders (apparently space invaders earned over $500 million in revenue for Taito in that time) and the 5th anniversary of Rilakkuma. I will follow up on Rilakkuma on a separate post but here are 2 quick links to get you started.
Shibuya246 