You never know when a simple thing like a marketing campaign by a random company will get out of control and take on a life of its own. That’s what happened when Japanese underwear manufacturer Wacoal decided to designate August 2nd — this date because, for phonetic reasons only Japanese can understand, 8/2 can be read as pantsu — as a day to promote its underwear to women. Over the past decade, the Internet has gone wild on pantsu no hi, or Panties Day, creating fanart that celebrated the joy of female underwear. Which we’re totally down with.
This kind of thing has happened before. A famous example is how Japan’s unique Valentine’s Day tradition got started. Although various efforts to get men to buy chocolate for their girlfriends and wives were tried in the 1930s and 1950s, the idea didn’t catch on, perhaps due to Japanese males’ famous shyness about showing their romantic feelings openly. Then in the early 1970s chocolate maker Morinaga got the idea to promote chocolate as something females gave to the men in their lives — classmates, boyfriends, husbands, fathers, male co-workers — which caught on famously, even spreading to several other Asian nations.
In Japan, you can’t receive a gift without giving one in return, which is called o-kaeshi. In 1977, a small Japanese chocolatier in Fukuoka started selling marshmallows for men to give to women on March 14, one month after Valentine’s Day. Soon other companies picked up on the idea, and White Day was born, a day to give a nice gift (usually white chocolate, these days) to whoever gave you chocolate in February.
I remember the first time I heard the words “Christmas cake”: it was in my Japanese textbook at SDSU, a paragraph about “the American John Smith” who had gone to Tokyo’s famous 〇〇 (“maru-maru”) University, where he encountered strange things he wasn’t familiar with, including the Japanese tradition of eating Christmas Cake on December 24th. Japan’s tradition of eating cake on Christmas Eve comes from the U.K., and is attributed (again) to the Morinaga confectionery company, which began marketing their delicious cakes to families in the 1960s. But instead of British-style Christmas cakes, which are often fruitcakes or Yule Logs, Japan’s version are always white pound cake with white frosting, with strawberries on top. Why? Because this looks like “Santa-san walking through the snow.”
Finally, there’s Twintail Day. On February 2nd, 2011, a fashion designer who loved Sailor Moon decided to create a company called the Japan Twintail Association which would promote models with cute twintail hair. Clever Internet marketing plus the innate cuteness of girls wearing this style of hair guaranteed he’d get a good response, and soon Twintail Day became a thing, with everyone posting cute fanart and selfies of their favorite twintail characters to social media.
Did you enjoy reading about the history of these random annual events, including Panties Day, in Japan? How are you going to celebrate Panties Day? Tell us on Twitter!
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