Hwaiteu Dei

Last Friday was a holiday, of sorts. In Korea Valentine's Day (Feb. 14) has been extended into a three-month affair through the addition of two more holidays: Hwaiteu Dei 화이트 데이 and Beullaek Dei 블랙 데이.

Hwaiteu Day is March 14, and Beullaek Day is April 14. Here's a Hwaiteu Dei banner I saw walking around this past Saturday, the day after the holiday.


I believe the model in the picture is holding a white heart-shaped box of chocolates.

So what is Hwaiteu Dei, or more importantly, why is Hwaiteu Dei? The answer to that question is related to the way that Valentine's Day is celebrated here in Korea (and, so far as I know, in Japan and Taiwan as well). On Valentine's Day, girls give presents to their boyfriends, usually chocolate.

On Hwaiteu Dei, a month later, the process is reversed: boys give presents to their girlfriends.

I learned about this from my teacher in class (I actually have three teachers, but it seems like too much trouble at this point to bother distinguishing them in the blog), who said that she had no idea why the holiday was called Hwaiteu Day. So I looked it up on Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge (much of it accurate).

It turns out Hwaiteu Day was a creation of a confederation of Japanese confection companies in 1978. With only half the Japanese population buying and giving chocolate on Valentine's Day, they must have seen a good marketing opportunity. And because Japan is a culture that contains many ritualized obligations, they probably figured they could get every male recipient of Valentine's Day chocolate to feel obligated to make a return gift. In keeping with the "opposite" theme of reversing the gift-giving direction, the confederation promoted the idea of giving white chocolate. (The Japanese holiday is called howaito dē ホワイトデー.)

I don't know if Koreans are aware of the Japanese commercial origin of this holiday or not. I suspect, based on what my teacher said about not understanding the origin of the holiday's name, that Koreans don't give white chocolate or white gifts on this day.

According to our teacher, and confirmed by Wikipedia, there is also Beullaek Dei, celebrated a month after Hwaiteu Dei. On this day single friends, who were unable to participate in either of the previous holidays, go out to eat the popular "Chinese" food jajangmyeon (자장면 炸醬麵). It's a noodle dish with a very dark black sauce. So far as I can tell Beullaek Dei is a purely Korean affair.

When I saw that Hwaiteu Dei banner I was walking around looking for some place to buy a toilet bowl scrubber. (I eventually found one, you'll be relieved to know.) Something else I saw on that walk was this:

It's the Habadeu-tel 하바드텔 or, as it says in smaller letters over the entrance, the 하바드오피스텔 Habadeu Opiseutel. The Harvard Officetel. I wonder if I'd walked in there with my diploma if they would have been obligated to give me a free room.