Sweet Madness pt.2

Now it's February and the Valentine's Day is coming up. I wrote about Valentine's Day in Japan a while back, and I found something interesting about the diffusion of a culture within a society.

A toy manufacturer, MegaHouse, has launched a toy called "Tororin Choco Pot" (Tororin is a mimetic word of something melting). It is basically a battery-operated heating pot with which you can melt chocolate bars and pour the resulting liquid into various shaped trays to make your own personalized chocolates. It is targeted at low-teen girls, and the manufacturer is expecting to sell 50,000 units by the end of March 2008. List price is 3,465 JPY (about 33 USD).

Now that adult females buy premier chocolates for the Valentine's Day, it used to be a trend that they buy chocolate bars at the stores and melt them to make their 'own' chocolate; pseudo-homemade. That was a trend over 10 years ago. Now the trend is back among the low-teens! Despite industry expectations, 'Tororin Choco Pot' is nearly out of stock in many retail stores. Now this is a typical 'back to the basics' movement or 'revival of the oldies'? Or just plain old idea-recycling. The real question is who are these little girls making chocolate for??