On Friday, in my first class of the morning (3rd grade), I did my standard for every class initial ten minutes or so of walking around talking individually to random students. I was getting a lot of “happy”s to my “how are you”s, so I asked one of the more advanced kids “why?” (a question which is apparently very easy to understand and very hard to answer without much vocab). Turns out this Saturday, all across South Korea, is the unofficial holiday of Pepero Day. That’s not a translation, that’s what they call it in Korean.

Pepero is the Korean incarnation of the little chocolate covered stick-shaped cookies, which may be familiar to some of my readers under their Japanese branding, Pocky.

So why Pepero Day? Because the date is 11/11. On the solar calendar anyway. You figure it out. The Wikipedia article on Pepero Day says there’s a rumor that it was started by middle school girls in Pusan. One fellow English teacher posted to our email list to report that a coworker of his claimed it was a 2,000 year-old Korean tradition. When this fellow teacher responded that they haven’t been using this particular calendar here that long (not to mention cookies or chocolate coverings thereof), he was greeted with silence. I’ll go ahead and subscribe to the belief that it’s kind of like the Korean version of Valentine’s day, without any of the pretense of having a saint behind it or anything. It’s just “hey buy lots of our product day.” I’m a big fan of any lack of pretense. I’m also a fan of having the script seriously flipped; rather than me giving out the candy, I received a rather ridiculous amount of it. Here is all the 1-shaped cookies I got from my students – some Pepero, some of other brands – all dumped unceremoniously on the floor. I cleaned them up later.

Both Pepero and Pocky are made by the Lotte group, one of several ultra-ubiquitous conglomerates in South Korea. Lotte may have been founded by a Korean, but, unlike the rest of the conglomerates here, is actually a Japanese company. Something that only one out of the eight present one night in my adult conversation class knew. The other big name conglomerates in Korea (Hyundai, Samsung., Dae Woo, etc…), the not-much-taught-to-Koreans story has it, pretty much all got their starts by whole-heartedly collaborating with the Japanese back in the day. But this was a post about cookies that look like 1s, so never mind…