The Origin of White Day: How Japan Invented a Reply to Valentine’s Day

If you think White Day got its name from white marshmallows, you’re half right — and half wrong. The holiday’s name is more likely rooted in candy than marshmallows. And “White Day” itself wasn’t there from the start: a confectionery company in Fukuoka launched the event in 1977 under the name “Marshmallow Day,” and the familiar title only emerged over the following years as the concept spread across the industry. How March 14 became a day when hundreds of millions of people across East Asia exchange gifts is the result of a letter to a magazine, a suggestion from a department store manager looking to fill slow spring weeks, and well-timed marketing by the confectionery industry.

Valentine’s Day in Japan: A Different Kind of Holiday

To understand White Day, you first need to understand how Valentine’s Day took root in Japan — because it took root in a strikingly different form. In the West, Valentine’s Day is a mutual exchange: both men and women give flowers, cards, and chocolates to each other. In Japan, the holiday hardened into something else entirely: a day when women give chocolate to men.^[1]

This tradition traces back to 1936, when Morozoff, a confectionery company based in Kobe, placed what is recorded as Japan’s first Valentine’s chocolate advertisement in the English-language newspaper The Japan Advertiser. The ad was aimed at the foreign community living in Kobe.^[1] Then in 1958, Mary’s Chocolate in Tokyo held Japan’s first “Valentine Fair,” and through the 1960s the custom gradually solidified: women confess their feelings to men they like through chocolate.^[2]

Out of this one-directional tradition grew two distinct categories of chocolate. Honmei choko (“true feelings chocolate”) is given to someone you genuinely have romantic feelings for. Giri choko (“obligation chocolate”) is distributed more broadly — to bosses, coworkers, and teachers — as a social courtesy rather than a personal declaration.^[2] The obligatory nature of giri choko was particularly pronounced: women were expected to buy chocolate for male superiors even when they had no personal feelings to express.

The Letter That Started It All

In 1977, Zenko Ishimura, president of Ishimura Manseido — a confectionery company headquartered in Hakata Ward, Fukuoka — was reading a women’s magazine when a reader’s letter caught his eye.^[3] The message was simple: “It’s unfair that men just receive chocolate on Valentine’s Day and give nothing back. Even marshmallows would do — there should be some kind of return gift.”^[3]

Inspired by the letter, Ishimura Manseido developed a new product: chocolate wrapped inside a marshmallow. They gave it a slogan: “I will wrap the chocolate you gave me in my warm feelings — marshmallow — and return it to you.”^[3] The concept was that a man who had received chocolate from a woman on Valentine’s Day would reciprocate in spring, returning the sentiment wrapped in marshmallow.

The choice of date also has a story behind it. Ishimura Manseido initially considered three candidates: April 12 (Valentine’s Day with the numbers reversed), February 21 (one week after Valentine’s Day), and March 14 (exactly one month later). The final call was made on the advice of Iwataya, a local department store. The store’s representatives strongly recommended March 14, explaining that it fell in the quietest period of the year for department store foot traffic — and that recommendation was accepted as-is.^[3]

On March 14, 1978, Ishimura Manseido held the event for the first time under the name “Marshmallow Day.”^[3]

Two Origins, One Name

Crediting Ishimura Manseido alone as the origin of White Day tells only half the story. At roughly the same time, a parallel movement was taking shape at the industry level.

In 1978, the National Candy Industry Cooperative Association resolved at its general meeting in Nagoya to designate March 14 as “the day to give candy” and to form a White Day Committee.^[4] Two explanations are offered for why the association chose the name “White Day”: one is that the English word “white” appeared in dictionaries as a symbol of sugar and sweetness; the other is that white was selected to evoke the idea of pure love.^[4]

From 1980 onward, the association launched a large-scale campaign under the slogan “White Day — Answering Love,” partnering with department store chain Mitsukoshi and advertising agency Dentsu.^[4] Radio ads, promotional campaigns, and major department store events followed in quick succession. From this point, White Day shifted from a single company’s initiative into a national commercial event.

Meanwhile, Ishimura Manseido gradually rebranded their “Marshmallow Day” as “White Day” over roughly eight years — drawing the image of “white” from the color of marshmallow, which aligned naturally with the name the industry association was cementing nationwide.^[3] Today, the Japan Anniversary Association officially registers Ishimura Manseido as the founding organization of White Day, and the company has received the association’s Anniversary Culture Award.^[3]

White Day, in the end, is a case where a confectionery company’s idea, an industry association’s institutionalization, and the commercial machinery of department stores and advertising agencies all converged from different directions and merged into a single holiday. Even the name “white” carries layers: the white of marshmallow, the white of refined sugar in candy, and the symbolism of pure love, all stacked on top of one another.

Why Japan Needed a “Return Day”

Valentine’s Day in the West is already a mutual exchange — both parties give and receive. So why did Japan alone develop a separate holiday one month later specifically for reciprocation?

The answer lies in Japan’s deeply rooted culture of gift exchange. In Japanese society, giving and receiving gifts is not simply an expression of feeling — it is an act of maintaining balance within a relationship. There is a broadly shared, unspoken expectation that receiving a gift obligates you to return something comparable, or better, at the appropriate moment. Seasonal gift-giving traditions like oseibo (year-end gifts given to express gratitude) and ochugen (midsummer gifts, also a form of reciprocal thanks) operate on the same principle.^[5]

Once Valentine’s Day had settled into Japan as “the day women give chocolate to men,” a collision with this reciprocity ethic was inevitable. A natural sense emerged that if a woman had given chocolate, the man was obliged to give something back. What Ishimura Manseido identified was precisely this cultural gap waiting to be filled.

The giri choko custom reinforced this dynamic further. Because women were expected to give chocolate to male superiors and colleagues as a matter of workplace obligation, the recipients — typically men — felt corresponding pressure to respond in kind. White Day effectively formalized the “obligation → reciprocation” cycle.^[6]

In the West, no such gap exists. Valentine’s Day is already bidirectional: in the United States, Europe, Australia, and Canada, men and women alike exchange flowers, cards, and gifts on February 14th, expressing their feelings simultaneously. In that structure, no debt of reciprocation is created in the first place. The reason White Day spread across East Asia but remained almost unknown in Western countries comes down to this difference in cultural foundation.^[7]

Spreading Across East Asia — and Adapting Along the Way

Through the 1980s and 1990s, White Day became firmly established within Japan. The practice then crossed borders, spreading to South Korea, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and other parts of East and Southeast Asia.^[7]

Each country absorbed the custom in its own way. In South Korea, both Valentine’s Day and White Day took hold under Japanese cultural influence, but an additional local layer emerged: Black Day on April 14. On this day, those who neither gave nor received gifts on either February 14 or March 14 gather to eat jajangmyeon — noodles in black bean sauce — commiserating over their single status. Like White Day itself, Black Day carries clear signs of commercial invention.^[8] South Korea developed an entire ecosystem of couple- and single-related observances centered on the 14th of each month.

In Taiwan and mainland China, White Day also took root, though in both places the emphasis tends to fall on romantic gift exchange between couples rather than the workplace obligation dynamic so pronounced in Japan.^[7] Outside Japan, marshmallows are rarely the gift of choice — chocolates, candies, and cookies are far more common across the East Asian region.

It is equally worth noting where White Day did not spread. Western countries — the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and most of Europe — remain largely unaware of it. The reason circles back to the structural difference in Valentine’s Day described earlier: where Valentine’s is already mutual, a reciprocation holiday is redundant. The fact that White Day was conceived from the outset as an industry marketing event also made it difficult for the holiday to take root organically in markets where no such campaign existed.^[7]

The “Triple Return” Rule and the Commercialism Critique

Another curious feature of White Day culture in Japan is the informal “three-times rule” (sanbai gaeshi, literally “returning three times over”): the widely circulated expectation that men should give a return gift worth roughly three times the value of what they received on Valentine’s Day.^[6] Where this norm originated is unclear, but from an industry standpoint it was a convenient convention — one that naturally nudged consumers toward more expensive purchases.

White Day is, in fact, deeply entangled with the revenue structure of the confectionery industry as a whole. Sales during the Valentine’s Day and White Day seasons account for a significant share of annual output for Japanese chocolate and candy manufacturers.^[9] In effect, the industry manufactured its own seasonal demand — demand that would not have existed without these two holidays.

Criticism has followed naturally. The giri choko custom placed women in a bind: they felt compelled to buy chocolate for male superiors not out of genuine affection but because of workplace hierarchy, while men in turn faced social pressure to reciprocate on White Day. Both holidays risked becoming less about expressing emotion and more about fulfilling obligation.^[10]

A Shifting Landscape — Decline and New Currents

In the late 2010s, Japan’s Valentine’s Day and White Day practices began to quietly shift.

The most visible change has been the decline of giri choko. As awareness of workplace harassment and the need for healthier office culture has grown, some companies have moved to explicitly prohibit the exchange of obligation chocolates at work.^[10] Among women, a trend called jibun choko (“chocolate for oneself”) has grown rapidly — buying premium chocolate for personal enjoyment rather than as an obligatory gift. The practice of tomo choko (“friend chocolate”), exchanged between close female friends, has similarly increased.

These changes have rippled through White Day sales figures as well. With fewer giri choko being given in the first place, there is naturally less for men to reciprocate on White Day.^[10] A practice sometimes called gyaku Valentine (“reverse Valentine”) has also emerged in some quarters — men giving chocolate to women first, flipping the conventional dynamic entirely.

Romantic White Day between couples, on the other hand, remains very much alive. The broader arc seems to be a slow repositioning of both holidays: away from obligation, and toward genuine expressions of affection.

Conclusion

White Day was presented from the very beginning as a holiday of pure, reciprocated love — yet its birth was entangled with a department store’s calculations about slow months, a candy industry association’s organized push to boost sales, and the particular gift-giving ethic of Japanese society. However romantic Ishimura Manseido’s marshmallow slogan may have been, March 14 was chosen because it happened to be the quietest time of year for department store foot traffic.

And yet the holiday has endured for nearly half a century. It found fertile ground in cultures where receiving something without giving something back creates a genuine sense of imbalance — and where there is a desire to formalize that act of return at the turning point of a season. White Day gave a calendar date to that impulse.

For most readers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, or Canada, White Day will likely be an unfamiliar name — and that unfamiliarity is itself revealing. Western Valentine’s Day was always bidirectional: a man buys his partner roses, she buys him chocolates, and no one is left with an unpaid social debt on February 15th. The reciprocal pressure that made White Day feel necessary in Japan simply does not build up in that context. If anything, the closest Western analogue might be the informal expectation that a dinner invitation should eventually be returned — a low-stakes social norm that nobody has yet turned into a retail holiday. The fact that White Day has remained resolutely East Asian despite decades of globalisation is a reminder that even the most commercially engineered customs need a pre-existing cultural groove to slide into.^[7]

That is how a confectionery idea born in Fukuoka came to fill the convenience store shelves of Seoul, Taipei, and Hanoi.