Another 1988 article, For the Taste of Love, in Asiaweek, Volume 14, says that it was specifically Hara Kunio of Mary Chocolate who got women to buy chocolate for Valentine's Day in Japan, and that he got a card from Europe explaining Valentine's day, rather than actually traveling to Europe.
A 1995 article Chocolate and the Meaning
of Valentine’s Day in Japan says:
Fujiya Company, in instructing its retail
stores on this new holiday, felt heartshaped
chocolates should be given to
lovers, intimate friends, mothers, grand
mothers, sisters, and admired teachers suggestions
that imply most chocolate
should be given to women, especially
members of the family. On the other hand,
Mary Chocolate, as we have seen, advertised Valentine’s Day as appropriate for
women to "confess love through presenting chocolate," presumably to men. Finally, Morinaga Company, in its early pro
motions, suggested women should buy
chocolates and give them to men but, in
its ads, depicted a woman eating the
chocolate herself?
In sum, how Valentine’s Day was to
be celebrated in Japan was not at all clear
at the beginning. The chocolate companies, by their early appropriation of the
holiday as a potential marketing tool,
focused Japanese attention on chocolate
as the appropriate gift to give, rather than
written or printed communications of
affection. But who should give chocolate
to whom was an open question, not to be
completely agreed upon for a decade or so
of cultural negotiation. But by the latter
half of the 1970s, the Japanese had settled on exclusively female-to-male gift giving.
According to the 1988 Dentsu Japan Marketing/advertising Yearbook:
