Valentine's Day in Japan

In Japan, Valentine's Day has been claimed by the chocolate industry. Most commonly, women give men chocolate. Honmei-choco to the man they love. Giri-choco to the men they work with. Friends give each other chocolate, too. Especially women. This is called tomo-choco.
I was the lucky recipient of some tomo-choco gifts myself. Last friday when I joined my first women's aikido class at Shosenji, a temple in nearby Toyonaka, we sat on the mat together after cleaning the dojo, and munched on squares of crunchy home-made chocolate. Then, one of the women started handing out little bouquets of paper roses. She had made them with her own bare hands and filled them with little chocolate-shaped footballs. Mouth agape, I turned my bouquet round and round and admired the finely crafted petals, while she told us she used to make these in her hometown for a charity event when she was younger and this year, felt like making them again.
Saturday night, C-san, one of my women students gave me a beutiful little box of green tea chocolates. You can see one of the chocolates it contained next to the paper roses in the picture on the right. Today, finally, a very rainy Valentine's Day proper, it rained buckets of chocolate at work, as well. I got chocolate from no less than three women. My favourite: little Hina, who made me cookies with her mum and presented them to me in a Lilo and Stitch bag. This way, I was able to plan my next lesson over a cup of tea accompanied by some wonderful biscuits in heart, mouse, and ghost shapes (see picture on the left).
Finally, I had a special Valentine's class with T-san and K-san, a very nice scientists' couple. Today they spent a romantic hour together, studying English conversation with me. Revising some vocabulary in the form of gradually uncovered word-bricks, they came up with the following little story (the fat words were the bricks):

Once upon a time, there was a red frog. On this particular day, he was wearing his favourite green hat and was walking merrily beneath the cherry blossoms. Wearing his favourite green hat and walking beneath the cherry blossoms, Frog was over the moon. He soon reached a crossroads where he was supposed to meet his girlfriend. He finally succeeded in meeting up with her, and everything was great. Then, however, the winter came, and the frogs suddenly felt very cold outside. But it so happened that they met Mouse who invited them to his house. So they arrived at Mouse's house, and surprisingy, it was equipped with a TV set, so they all watched Disney films together. Very happily, they sat there whiling the winter away, watching Disney films and eating sweet popcorn. But then, suddenly, Mouse turned quite cruel. But this was only because he could hear Cat coming and wanted everyone to run away. But the frogs stood their ground and bravely faught Cat until, after a long, hard fight, they emerged victorious, and all of them lived happily ever after.

I'm very proud of my students for coming up with such a sweet little story. And as a final note on Valentine's day, in the name of T-san, K-san, and the frogs, I would like to wish everyone lots of love, adventure and happy endings in their lives!