You thought chocolate was a big deal in the UK on Valentine’s Day? Just take a look at Japan. With a tradition of ‘obligation chocolates’ on the 14th of February where women are made to give their male colleagues chocolate, hot spring resorts unveiling ‘chocolate water’ steam baths and sushi restaurants offering raw yellowtail raised on chocolate-engrained feed, the country is all about the sweet treat.
However, one of those traditions is being challenged by women in Japan: the forced gifting of chocolate known as ‘giri choco’. Giri choco, which translates literally as obligation chocolates, is a decades old practice in Japan, where women are expected to buy chocolates for their male workmates, with men reciprocating a month later on White Day, the 14th of March.
With thousands of yen spent on chocolate each year (which is admittedly a lot less in British pounds, given 1000 yen is about £7), a survey by one Tokyo department store found that 60% for women would rather buy chocolates for themselves than their male colleagues (women after our own hearts). Further, more than 56% would also prefer to give them to family members, and 36% said they would rather gift them to a partner or crush.
And it's not just the women obligated that are refusing to partake, the increasing backlash has led more and more workplaces to actually ban the practice- with many workers citing it as an abuse of power and harassment. ‘Before the ban, we had to worry about things like how much is appropriate to spend on each chocolate and where we draw the line in who we give the chocolates to, so it’s good that we no longer have this culture of forced giving,’ said one of the surveyed workers, according to Japan Today.
Click through for all your non-cringe Valentine's Day film choices this week...
Non-cringe valentine's day films - Grazia
1 of 7Frances Ha
Before Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig put the ins and outs of twenty-something female friendships under the microscope in Frances Ha. Shot in black and white and co-written with her partner Noah Baumbach, we follow aspiring dancer Frances as she navigates that inevitable but no less heartbreaking shift that occurs when your closest friend settles into a serious relationship. Sometimes, it's easy to feel like you're missing every 'adult' milestone that your friends are effortlessly breezing through: with its balance of whimsical humour and wry self-awareness, Frances Ha is the film to remind you that it's OK to find your own rhythm.
2 of 7The Big Sick
Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in and out of love, girl develops rare and vicious auto-immune disease and falls into a coma. It's a rom-com of sorts, but last year's sleeper hit The Big Sick is so charming - and mercifully free from Hallmark card schmaltz - that it'll win over the coldest of cold-hearted of cynics. Co-written by Silicon Valley's Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, it's a memorable and moving rendition of their real-life romance (with Zoe Kazan standing in for Emily on screen) that'll probably-definitely make you cry (but in, you know, a happy sort of way).
3 of 7Brooklyn
Thanks to Saoirse Ronan's lead performance, Brooklyn is a film to be treasured. Adapted from the novel by Colm Toibin, it follows Eilis, an Irish girl who leaves her small hometown to cross the Atlantic and make a new life for herself in '50s New York, tentatively finding her feet (and falls in love) before a family tragedy forces her to return home. Unashamedly emotive without ever feeling gushily sentimental, Brooklyn's charm lies in that fact that it's very much a brilliant coming-of-age story first and a love story second.
4 of 7Sing Street
If you can beg, steal or borrow a Netflix log in, there's no excuse for not watching Sing Street, a charmingly lo-fi musical set in 1980s Dublin that continues to fly inexplicably under the radar. You could sum it up as a high school La La Land with the DIY spirit of something like Son of Rambow (also lovely, also set in the '80s and also under-watched) but that might be over-complicating things: Sing Street is the story of an awkward teen who decides that the surest route to winning over an out-of-his-league love interest is to form a band, complete with earworm '80s hits, backyard videos shot on camcorders and adolescent angst. As close to televisual dopamine as you can get.
5 of 7An Education
Based on an autobiographical essay by journalist Lynn Barber, An Education basically kick-started Carey Mulligan's screen career, which is certainly something to be thankful for. That aside, it's a coming-of-age tale that's by turns winningly breezy and painfully dark, following 16-year-old Jenny as she's taken in by a smooth-talking older man. In a similar vein to Brooklyn (both films were sensitively adapted for the screen by author Nick Hornby) though, this isn't a story about love so much as it is about a young woman growing in self-awareness.
6 of 7Hidden Figures
What's not to like about a film that finally gives proper recognition to a group of female mathematicians that history has largely forgotten? The names Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson - the women whose number-crunching helped America win the space race – aren't yet household names, but thanks to Hidden Figures, that's changing. A feel-good film that also touches on the era's fraught racial politics, it made quite rightly made major inroads at the box office on both sides of the Atlantic last year – if you haven't already watched it, do so ASAP for an instant I-can-do-anything mood boost.
7 of 7Bend It Like Beckham
If your go-to uplifting comfort watch is an American high school movie or Noughties classic in the vein of Legally Blonde, may we recommend that you revisit a brilliant nostalgic gem from this side of Atlantic, namely Bend It Like Beckham? Over 15 years later, Gurinder Chadha's culture-clash football comedy is still hilarious and uplifting. Plus, did you even realise at the time that All Saints' Shaznay Lewis plays one of Jess's teammates? Youth is wasted on the young.
However, in the name of boosting sales and rebranding the uncomfortable image, confectionaries have been quick to react. Having started the trend back in the 1980’s to boost chocolate sales (an illuminating insight into the entire basis of Valentine's Day, let's be honest), the backlash has pushed marketing campaigns in a new direction with one Belgian chocolatier - Godiva - running a full-page news advert against the trend last year. ‘Valentine’s Day is a day when people convey their true feelings, not coordinate relationships at work,’ the ad read, urging firms not to push for giri choco on workers if it meant women were obligating out of force.
While the ad wasn’t well-received by fellow chocolatiers (surprise), women have been more than happy to take on the advice. This year, more and more women are expected to abandon giri choco and hopefully do exactly as they said in the survey, instead gifting themselves chocolate. We know what we’d rather do...