Valentine’s Day
A fun part of localization is being aware of different holidays and how they’re celebrated. Someone from an English speaking western country might think that when they see that Valentine’s Day is celebrated in Japan, that it’s about the man giving the woman chocolate and maybe some flowers.
NOT SO FAST!
In Japan, reportedly originally due to a typo in advertising, women are supposed to give men chocolate. I like to think the typo was an act of rebellion by a businessman wanting free chocolate.
There are 3 types of chocolates that women give. There’s giri-choco (義理チョコ), which translates to “obligation chocolate”, which is for people like coworkers, bosses and teachers, honmei-choco (本命チョコ) which is for romantic reasons, and tomo-choco (友チョコ) which is given to friends. Whew, that’s a lot of chocolate! It also shows a small case of how holidays and culture can be unexpectedly different. If a company sells chocolate in Japan for Valentine’s Day with a translated headline like, “Buy chocolate for your man today,” that not only would be advertising for a different gender, but it wouldn’t count in the giri-choco and tomo-choco categories. Sure, that company could just pay for the translation and put up an internet ad or post it to social media and fail horribly, or they could hire someone who knows the local market better who can localize their marketing rather than just translate it.
White Day
There’s also a holiday in Japan called White Day, which occurs on March 14th, where the men give women chocolates. The women who get the chocolates are usually the ones who gave chocolates to the man. However, somewhere along the line some people reportedly made a rule that men should give 3 times the worth of the chocolate given to them to the women. That’s a bold marketing move if the rule was created by a business. I equally expect it could have been made by someone’s girlfriend who wanted more chocolates, and I like to think when she told her friends they then went on to say something to their boyfriends or husbands along the lines of, “LOL yeah the rule is 3 times as much chocolate. That’s what I heard so you need to follow the rule.”
A similar reversal of gender roles with chocolate giving isn’t its own holiday in English speaking western countries, and a chocolate company wanting to expand in Japan would do well to have their social media and other marketing tailored to the Japanese market enough so that they can capitalize on it. If you want to localize your marketing in Japan you can contact us to get started. Japan has the 3rd largest economy in the world, so there is a lot of opportunity to market your product using localized Japanese.
What do you think of Japan’s Valentine’s Day? What’s your ideal Valentine’s Day?