We have exported to Japan since the 2000s. It has been the most demanding market the house has ever met, and that is exactly why we stayed.
A Japanese buyer does not discuss price first. They ask about composition, origin, consistency, stability in transport, whether the packaging matches the brand's own words. They check. Then they order, and they come back. This path bears little resemblance to a European market, and it shapes any house that submits to it, permanently.
Here is what we have learned there.
A custom born of an advertising campaign
In Japan, Valentine's Day is a festival of chocolate, and it runs the opposite way to ours. It is women who give, to men, on 14 February.
The origin has nothing romantic about it. The custom was introduced after the Second World War and popularised in the 1950s by Japanese confectioners' advertising campaigns. A commercial idea, then, that met something deeper in the society that received it, and took root there for good.
A month later, on 14 March, comes White Day. Men who received a gift return the favour, traditionally with a present in a pale colour. Here too, the invention is Japanese, and recent.
For the country's chocolatiers, this February window is decisive: it is commonly said to account for a considerable share of the profession's annual turnover. No Western market concentrates demand so heavily into a few weeks.
A grammar of giving
What strikes a European is the precision of the vocabulary. Chocolate is not a generic gift. Every kind of relationship has its own word, and each word calls for a particular kind of product.
Honmei choco, literally "destiny chocolate," is given to the person one loves. It is refined, often bought at a high-end chocolatier, sometimes handmade by the giver, which gives it even more value.
Giri choco, "obligation chocolate," is given to colleagues, superiors, professional contacts. It expresses respect and gratitude, with no romantic ambiguity. It is deliberately chosen to be simpler, sometimes less costly, precisely so the message stays clear.
Tomo choco circulates among female friends, a usage that appeared in the 2000s. Fami choco goes to family. Gyaku choco, "reverse chocolate," is given by a man to a woman: a Japanese manufacturer has tracked this trend since 2008, and these boxes are recognisable by their deliberately reversed printing.
And then there is the newest arrival, which is changing everything.
The shift few people have noticed
Jibun choco is chocolate one buys for oneself. The usage appeared in the 2010s, carried by a simple idea: why wait for someone to give you some.
One could take it for a curiosity. The figures say otherwise. A 2022 survey by a major Japanese department store, of 2,500 people, found that 36% of women surveyed bought chocolate for themselves first. 27% for their family. 15% as a mark of gratitude. 8% for a loved one. And only 3% as giri choco.
Obligation chocolate, which long defined Japanese Valentine's Day and fed every news report on the subject, has become marginal. The leading motive for purchase is now personal pleasure.
For an artisan, this shift is excellent news, and it is worth understanding why.
Obligation chocolate is bought quickly, in bulk, cheaply. No one really tastes it. Chocolate bought for oneself is bought differently: with no social alibi, no recipient to consider, no criterion beyond the pleasure expected. The buyer will be alone with the product. She will judge the texture, the finish, the persistence, the packaging she opens for herself.
It is the most unforgiving judgement there is, and it is exactly the one that rewards a chocolate made with pure cocoa butter, flavoured with natural essential oils, produced in small quantities.
The department store as an examination hall
Japan has another distinctive feature: luxury chocolate there passes through department stores, in spaces that have no real equivalent elsewhere.
We took part in 2020 in the Salon du Chocolat at Isetan Shinjuku, Tokyo. A European chocolatier exhibiting there understands within a few hours exactly where they stand. Houses from around the world stand side by side, the public tastes, compares, asks questions, and knows the products. Many visitors can tell one couverture from another and recognise a tempering fault.
You do not sell a story there. You sell what is in the box, and the story comes afterwards, as confirmation.
Two other seasons the West ignores
Valentine's Day monopolises attention, but the Japanese calendar of gift-giving counts two others, older and culturally deeper.
Ochugen, in July, and oseibo, in December, are the seasons when one gives to those to whom one owes a debt of gratitude: a superior, a teacher, a doctor, a business partner. These gifts are not gestures of affection but of recognition, and they follow precise rules of value, packaging and presentation.
For a foreign house, these two windows are less contested than February, and they reward exactly what an artisan knows how to do: a product of constant quality, in a carefully considered box, that honours the recipient as much as the giver.
What Japan has taught us
Three things, and they have changed the way we work.
Consistency outranks the feat. One exceptional piece followed by an average one is worth less than an irreproachable series. A Japanese buyer does not judge a chocolate, they judge a production.
Packaging is part of the product. In a culture where the act of giving is codified, a box is not a container, it is the first thing the recipient touches. It must speak the same language as what it protects.
What is said must be true. Claiming pure cocoa butter is a commitment. Claiming a patented process is a commitment. In this market, any gap between the claim and the product eventually shows, and it never mends.
A house from 1688
Our Japanese partner is called Chikuma. It has produced miso for three hundred and thirty-seven years, and its history deserves telling, because it illuminates what duration means in this country.
It all begins around 1648, in the province of Ise, south of what is now Mie prefecture. A merchant named Takeguchi Sakubei left his village for Edo and opened a lacquerware shop in Nihonbashi. His village was called Chikuma. It is from this place name, not a family name, that the house takes its name.
In 1688, the first year of the Genroku era, his successor set up a miso works at the foot of the Eitai Bridge, in the Fukagawa district, under the sign Chikumaya Sakubei. That is the founding date.
What happened on 14 December 1702
The first Sakubei had a passion: poetry. He was a disciple of a renowned haikai master of Edo, and he practised alongside the master's other pupils.
One of those fellow disciples was named Ōtaka Gengo. He was also one of the forty-seven rōnin of Akō.
On the night of 14 December 1702, these forty-seven men attacked Kira's residence at Honjo to avenge their lord. It is the most famous episode in Japanese history, the one theatre has handed down under the name Chūshingura, one every Japanese person knows.
Their revenge accomplished, they set out for Sengaku-ji temple, where their master lay, to surrender themselves. It was snowing. The way was long.
Along the road, they stopped at the miso merchant Chikumaya. Sakubei, recognising his fellow poet, served them amazake, that sweet fermented rice drink, and a hot porridge, to warm them. They rested. Then they crossed the Eitai Bridge and continued towards Sengaku-ji, where they would surrender and be condemned to death.
A stone marker stands today in front of the Chikuma building, a few steps from the bridge. It marks the resting place of the loyal men of Akō.
And every December, the house serves amazake there to passers-by. It has done so for three centuries.
What this says about a house
Chikuma today sells an amazake called Genroku rōshi, after the era and those men. No added sugar, no additive, its only sweetness coming from rice kōji. It is not a spin-off product: it is the same gesture, carried forward.
The house has lived through the great fire of 1829, the earthquake of 1855, the fall of the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration and the Great Kantō earthquake. It is now in its sixteenth generation. It supplies the Imperial Household Agency. Its name appears in a kabuki play performed since the start of the Meiji era, in which a character declares it is no wonder the miso is good, since for miso there is only Chikuma.
To be named in a classic play performed for a hundred and fifty years is the Japanese equivalent of a European house appearing in a chanson de geste.
Two houses, one way of counting
We are a Belgian house founded in 1974, working with a Japanese house founded under the Tokugawa. The scale of time puts certain things in their place. We are not the elders here. We are learning.
But there is a resemblance between us that may explain why we understand each other.
Chikuma was built on a gesture: serving a hot drink to men making their way home through the snow, because one of them was a friend. Three centuries later, the house still serves that amazake in the same place, every winter.
Our own sign is that of a sovereign who validated his acts with a single stroke traced by his own hand. Everything else was prepared. That stroke decided.
Two houses that have each made a single gesture the centre of their identity, and have kept repeating it since, one for three hundred and thirty-seven years, the other for fifty. This is not a shared culture. It is a shared way of counting: in generations, in gestures handed down, in people who come back.
Apparently, that is enough to understand one another across nine thousand kilometres.