Centuries ago, Chinese culture and customs spread throughout the countries of East Asia, passing into Korea and from there crossing the Korean Strait to Japan. The Chinese writing system and Buddhism traveled this route and had an enormous impact on Japan, changing that country forever.

Discussed less frequently, but just as true, is that the route is still exists conveying culture and customs. Today, however, these originate in Japan, are picked up by the Koreans, and wind up in China. Of course, modern telecommunications and transportation will sometimes be the means of transmission directly to such places as Taiwan and Hong Kong. While no one will try to equate karaoke and Hello Kitty with kanji or a Buddhist sutra, they are nevertheless what passes for culture today and have been enthusiastically adopted by people throughout East Asia. (Although some linguistic transmission is occurring from Japan to Korea and China, too.)

A description of the background of one aspect of this reverse cultural transmission appeared today in the print edition of the Nishinippon Shimbun. That newspaper has been running a series called Kawaru Mono Kawaranu Mono (Things that Change and Things that Don’t Change) by Eiichi Akiyama, the former vice-president of Lotte in Korea. (Lotte was originally a department store that expanded into other enterprises.) Akiyama has been describing Lotte’s early efforts to establish a presence in South Korea.

Today he looks back on Lotte’s creation of Valentine’s Day in South Korea. Akiyama starts by defining Valentine’s Day as that day in which women give chocolate to the men they’re sweet on, though allowing that many of these presents also are given as giri choco, or “obligation chocolate”, which a woman will give to her male co-workers. He states as common knowledge that this custom is shared around the world, though of course this form of the custom is uniquely Japanese and would be unfamiliar to people in the West (especially the very idea of obligation chocolate).

Akiyama says that soon after Lotte opened in South Korea in 1980, he became involved in conjuring up the custom in South Korea. By that time, every major department store in Japan held Valentine’s Day promotions, and it was one of their important revenue sources. When he brought up the subject at a meeting with his Korean employees, however, he says that no one had the faintest idea what he was talking about. But, he relates, the employees were interested and started work to create a local Korean campaign.

Lotte put up large billboards a week before February 14th and began to sell the chocolate, but their first campaign was unsuccessful, with sales worth only about 1.5 million won. This would be roughly US$1,500 today, a negligible sum. Nevertheless, they tried again next year, this time adding the White Day concept from Japan.

(On White Day, March 14th, the men in Japan who received chocolate return the favor by giving the women a present. At first this was marshmallows, hence the name White Day. Most men at Japanese workplaces find it annoying to buy presents for women who gave them chocolate merely out of a sense of obligation. It has little positive effect on the mood of the workplace, except those selling confections. Most people seem to be doing it because everyone else is doing it. For my part, after a couple of years, I told the women where I worked at the end of January they didn’t have to bother getting me any obligation chocolate. They had no problem dispensing with the custom for me, and we had no problem working with each other.)

The second year, Lotte noticed that some confectionary shops in South Korea also went along with their campaign, and the local department stores started their Valentine’s Day sales one year after that.

Akiyama describes the harsh response of the South Korean mass media. Some complained that even primary school students were buying the chocolate, while others said that the young people of South Korea were being poisoned by Japan’s evil consumer culture. (I wonder if the Japanese said the same thing about American consumer culture when the practice began there.) The former Lotte official admits that a gift of chocolate in those days was a more serious financial outlay than it is today, and that Lotte bore the brunt of criticism because it was seen as a representative of Japan.

But the custom caught on among Korean young people. Akiyama attributes this to a Korean love for special occasions, plus an existing local custom of couples celebrating the 100th day of their relationship. Over the years it became as generally accepted among Korean young people as it is among the Japanese, and in 1997 Lotte’s main Korean outlet alone sold US$560,000 worth of chocolate during the season. Thus, it took Lotte fewer than 20 years to invent a holiday in South Korea.

Akiyama concludes the article by recalling that they also considered creating a Halloween campaign in South Korea during the 80s, but thought better of it. The Korean media came down hard enough as it was on a romantic event such as Valentine’s Day, and Lotte concluded that a day devoted to getting children to dress up as monsters and ghouls wouldn’t go over well in South Korea at all.