Hataraku Maou-sama! - Volume 16 - Chapter Aft

THE AUTHOR, THE AFTERWORD, AND YOU! 
I once heard that the person we all should thank the most on Valentine’s Day is the guy who invented the concept of giving out chocolate for politeness’s sake. 
It can be hard to drum up the courage to give chocolate to the one you truly love, but if you’re handing out little treats to the people you deal with on a daily basis, most people are like Fair enough to that or use it as an excuse to go all out. The end result is more people purchasing chocolate, and it means that a good fifth of all the chocolate sold in Japan each year is consumed on February 14. 
You don’t see this custom quite as much as you used to in Japanese workplaces, as part of an effort to get rid of useless formalities and encourage nonhostile work environments. In the future, then, Valentine’s Day is going back to its original function—women relating their feelings to the one they truly love, or people giving out sweet treats for fun. 

Looking back on the history of Valentine’s, I have to say they dropped the ball right at the end with White Day, a tradition that was invented and propagated by Japan. The origins of Valentine’s Day itself can be traced back years and years, perhaps all the way back to the Roman Empire; White Day, meanwhile, was declared to be March 14 by Japan’s National Confectionery Industry Association in 1980. Nobody’s quite sure who first sold sweets as a way to “answer” Valentine’s gifts, but White Day was entirely an invention by the candy industry to get men to “repay” women for their thoughts. 
In Japan, it’s traditionally considered rude to accept a gift without offering something in return, maybe half or a third of the value, as compensation of a sort. That explains how White Day got its start, but somewhere along the line, it turned into this “Pay her back three times over for Valentine’s!” thing, and people started giving accessories and other regular presents instead of chocolate. The Japan National Confectionery Industry Association was, of course, trying to get men to buy candy to “answer” women’s Valentine’s overtures, but I’ve never read anything that indicated candy sales going through the roof on March 14 or anything. I’m not sure it really fulfilled what the co-op was trying to do with it. 
Some people like to warp this around, saying Valentine’s Day is all just a conspiracy by the sweets industry—but with White Day, that really is the case. A tradition is something started by people reacting to the times, the weather, their homeland, or the local natural features, eventually taking root and evolving over time before acquiring its current form. Those same things are still gradually changing our traditions today, perhaps turning them into completely different things in the future—or maybe even causing them to die out. 
The Devil Is a Part-Timer! Volume 16 is all about how even the smallest passing thoughts or actions have the potential to affect how we live and which customs we observe. You don’t need to use fancy terms like “the butterfly effect” to see how you, being alive, have a small yet noticeable effect, direct or indirect, on the world around you. It’s not easy to change customs once they take hold, but the world is changing, little by little, right this instant, whether you want it to or not. 
Hopefully, you enjoyed this story of people struggling in this whirlpool of changes, trying to find a path for themselves. See you in the next volume!