Japan's Valentines Day!

Of course everyone has heard of Valentine's Day, and it's as big a deal here in Japan as anywhere else. Everyone loves receiving gifts like a dozen roses for Valentine's Day, right? Indeed it's a rare chance for the notoriously reserved Japanese people to show a bit of love. But how many of you know about White Day? No, it has nothing to do with racial pride or laundry detergent.

It's exactly one month after Valentine's Day and the two are a pair. In Japan, the Valentine's Day tradition is for girls and women to give gifts (usually chocolate or cookies) to the boyfriends, husbands, fathers, teachers, bosses, co-workers, guys they pass on the street...no, wait, it's not quite that extreme. But the concept of "giri-choco", or giving chocolates out of duty rather than love is common though not something most women really feel like doing. If the gift is to be seen as really heartfelt, it needs to be handmade. So department stores will do a brisk trade in the various ingredients needed to make chocolate confectionaries. With all the romantic hype in stores and the media, as well as the pressure of giri-choco, a guy who gets no chocolates on Valentine's Day is entitled to feel like something is seriously wrong with not just his social life but also his workplace.

Anyway, for the ladies the pay-off comes a month later on March 14, when it's the guys' turn to give something back. With the name White Day, I suppose the gift should be something white, and the only "tradition" I have heard regularly is that it was white lingerie. But I can't imagine that actually happens so often except between particularly romantic couples. The other rule, called "sanbai-gaeshiin," is that the guys are supposed to give a gift worth three times the value of what they received a month earlier (oh right, that's fair!). And certainly it's common to hear high school girls saying they give a couple of hundred yen's worth of giri-choco to their Dads only with the ulterior motive of getting a Gucci bag or something similarly extravagant in return. Such is the materialism of today's Japanese youth! But the most common gifts semm to be chocolates, cookies and flowers, all the way up to jewelry and those expensive accessories that many ladies hope for and hint at but don't ask for outright.

White Day, as you have probably already guessed, is a creation of marketing minds rather than anything remotely traditional. Though some sources talk about similar ideas in the mid-1960s, it's popularity only dates back to the early 1980's and so it doesn't have quite the marketing punch of its February partner. But if you got something from a young lady last week, you might want to consider the consequences of not giving something back...

Ukiyo-e Paintings and Prints

Ukiyo-e, 'pictures of the floating world', depict the Kabuki actors, courtesans and female entertainers (geisha) of the pleasure-quarters of urban Japan, where men (strictly, commoners, but also numbers of samurai) went to escape the rigid social hierarchy of feudal society.

The Ukiyo-e school developed out of early seventeenth century fūzokuga ('genre paintings') of the entertainment districts of Kyoto and Osaka. However, by the late seventeenth century, the centre of demand for these works had moved east to the Shogun's capital city of Edo (modern Tokyo), with the rapid growth of the wealthy merchant class there.





Ukiyo-e artists worked in a number of formats. Printed books (guide-books, picture-books, illustrated narratives, and illustrated poetry anthologies) grew in popularity as literacy rates increased. Many Ukiyo-e artists were also commissioned by rich clients to produce hanging-scroll paintings (nikuhitsu), often showing single figures of celebrated courtesans. However, it was the single-sheet woodblock print that was most readily available as a cheap memento or pin-up, and many thousands of designs were produced by a succession of highly accomplished artists.

 



Many of the earlier Ukiyo-e prints by artists such as Hishikawa Moronobu, Sugimura Jihei (worked about 1680-1705), Torii Kiyomasu I (worked about 1700-20), Nishimura Shigenaga (died 1756) were hand-coloured. From the early 1740s, Okumura Masanobu (?1686-1764) and others started to use a limited number of colour blocks.

Japanese Dolls- OKIKU NINGYO

Ningyo is the name for a traditional doll in Japan. Word-for-word ningyo means "human shape" and there is a story long ago in Japan about a doll that its hair is growing, it is called the Okiku Ningyo.

The kimono-dressed doll was purchased during 1918 by a young boy named Eikichi Suzuki for hir 2-year old sister named Okiku. Okiku played with the doll everyday but she died in a severe cold the following year. The family placed the doll in their household altar and prayed to it everyday in the memory of Okiku. 

Okiku Ningyo in the altar

Later, the family noticed that dolls' hair is starting to grow. They've seen it as sign of Okiku's restless spirit has taken refuge in the doll. They took the hair in the lab and result is its a real human hair. 

 In 1938, the Suzuki family moved to Sakhalin and they put the doll in care at the Mannenji temple where it has remained ever since.

The hair continues to grow every year and the people in Japan started to have a ceremony in memory of Okiku. They trim the hair each year. 

Nobody has every explained why is the doll's hair continues to grow but one scientific examination was held and it is concluded that the hair is indeed a hair of a young child.