Dash thru White Day

I kind of fussed about Valentine's Day before, but it seems like a month has passed since then in the outside world. Hey, it only feels like a week in my head. Where did the other three weeks go?

So I was wondering, do they have White Day in other places? I looked up on the web and found out that there are similar customs (I don't even know if you can really refer to them as customs) in surprisingly many countries! They have different names like Poppy Day, Cookie Day, Marshmallow Day so on so forth, but the basic common understanding seems to be "to celebrate one month from the day the lovers confirm their love." Eeeks, what an itchy day! Anyway, the customs seem to be there.

But then, why is it "white" in Japan? The story is that the candy industry (and I mean like hard candies excluding chocolate) jealous (oops, I made that part up) of the chocolate industry which successfully made Valentine's Day their day, somehow wanted to make this one month anniverssary their day to promote candies. The initial plan included ideas like calling the day "Candy Day" but some airy one suggested "white" b/c "white is the symbol of purity and goes well with the pure love of teens". So the others were like, "Okay, make it White Day and this is how it all started.
Well, is it only me that thinks the purpose itself is pretty black?

However, I don't really see guys giving back candies for White Day nowadays. It's true that if you search for "White Day" on google web search you get the candy association's "WHITEDAY OFFICIAL SITE" the very first (ugh). What the hell do they mean official???
As a webmaster myself I can't help thinking, "wow, they must've really worked on the SEO..."

Uh, sorry, but the members of the association? I'm afraid that choosing candies as the return gift in present day Japan where the tacit understanding of "return gifts must be more than twice the Valentine gift" has deeply rooted can kill you. Before spending so much time and energy on SEO perhaps you want to develop a candy that has a surprise diamond coming out :-P