[Hamster chef, Seleria, reporting live from Osaka :3]

I, along with my friend, whom we shall call Bernice, decided to add a spin to our Valentine’s and celebrate it like how a Japanese girl would. Instead of waiting for guys to give us chocolates and flowers during this day of hearts, we were the ones giving out some sweet tokens to the guys in our project.

February 14 is a day for girls to show their feelings by giving out chocolates to their guy friends and perhaps, their special someone. Although, there are 2 kinds of chocolates to be given out: love chocos and obligatory chocos (don’t laugh, it’s true :p). They also have what they call “White Day” celebrated on the 14th of March. This is when the guys will “return the favor” and give out chocolates to the girls. Rumor has it that guys will repay the girl thrice as much chocolate as he received!

So, with that, Bernice and I prepared 20 boxes of chocos to give out, with cute little notes where we wrote the message: 「いろいろとありがとうごさいます！　いい勉強になりました。」 “Thank you for everything! We have learned a lot.”

The chocolates that we gave to our immediate Japanese boss was special from the rest. It had whiskey inside it. He joked saying that, “This must be love だな”, implicating we gave him the chocolates out of love haha. When he remarked that the chocolates seemed expensive, I joked back saying, “It’s love だよ”. Two can play that game :p

The best parts of the activity were the rather entertaining reactions we were able to elicit from those who received our “love” chocos. There weren’t many guys in our project who were about our age, so most of the people we gave out chocolates to were our superiors a nice term of saying “older”. Reactions ranged from shocked, slightly embarrassed, pleasantly surprised, there were even those who blushed, reminding me of those giddy little school girls, who get excited when their crush accidentally casts a glance their way. Grown men wearing business suits with tomato red faces are a sight to behold.

Overall, I think they were happy to receive chocos from such lovely beauties/rodents :p I think they were also somewhat amazed that our note was completely in Japanese, except for the “Happy Valentine’s” written on the front.

There is only one other girl in our project, aside from us, whom I lovingly nicknamed as Nodame-chan. She reminds me of Nodame of Nodame Cantabile, not only for her looks, but for her disposition as well. Last weekend, while shopping around, we spotted a necklace with a piano keys pendant design, for a nice price at that. So, Bernice and I split the cost and thought it would be a perfect gift for Nodame-chan. For those who don’t know, Nodame in Nodame Cantabile is a pianist and she brings around a bag with piano keys design. We gave the necklace to Nodame-chan on Valentine’s too. She looked very happy to get our gift, you can tell by her smile.

I am happy to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my first, and perhaps only, Japanese Valentine’s. Though, it felt more like Christmas with all the gift-giving and without the romantic tension (or is there? :p). Despite spending a bit for all the chocolates and the necklace, the smiles and childlike giggles that we got from our Japanese counterparts were definitely worth more than we could have ever expected.

Belated Happy Valentine’s everyone!