Valentine’s Day is a torment for single people all over the world but few have as much to endure as young Japanese such as Hiroyuki Egami.

The soppy pink cards and boxes of over-priced chocolate start appearing in shops in early January. By the time February 14 finally comes around shops, advertisers and the mass media are united in a sugary hymn to the virtues of romance.

“It’s this idea that you only have value if you’re half of a couple, that you have to be in a relationship,” Mr Egami, a 23-year-old website designer, said. “But I never had a girlfriend. I am still a virgin. I think I am more unpopular than most people. And there are others like me.”

Rather than suffering in silence, a few months ago Mr Egami set up a social networking site, along the lines of Facebook and MySpace. Instead of encouraging members to get together to find friendship and love, however, it is intended for socially awkward people who revel in their isolation, undesirability and gaucheness.

They call themselves himote — the unpopular — and in the past few months they have stepped out of the shadows to assert themselves as never before.

With 15,000 members Mr Egami’s Himote SNS is the biggest of several online communities for the socially maladjusted, including the Himote Army and a proliferating number of bulletin boards on 2-Channel, Japan’s — and the world’s — biggest internet forum.

The rules of Himote SNS are spelt out on its home page.

“This site is not for Ria-juu,” it explains, using the himote acronym for "People who are Satisfied with Real Life". “It’s not for the kind of people who would write in their diary, ‘Today I went shopping with my friends.’ Your web entry should basically focus on miserable stories of being unpopular.”

Mr Egami added: “The iron rule is this: if you find a girlfriend, you’re out.”

Almost no race makes as much fuss about Valentine’s Day as the Japanese, for whom the festival is spread out over four weeks.

Today women are supposed to give chocolate to their sweethearts. On March 14 — White Day — men reciprocate with gifts of white chocolate. The only country to go further is South Korea where White Day is followed, on successive months, by Black, Yellow, Silver and Green Days, each of them dedicated to different kinds of romantic gift giving.

Amid such rampant and cynical consumerism it is hardly surprising that an anti-Valentine revolution should have arisen. The himote divide themselves into sub-categories, including mo-dan (unpopular boys), mo-jo (unpopular girls), home security guards(the house-bound unemployed) and mahotsukai — or wizards, based on a himote belief that those who reach the age of 30 as virgins acquire supernatural powers.

So successful has the movement been that its members have started to overcome their shyness and take the faltering steps to meet in the real world. In the early hours of today members of Himote SNS gathered in central Tokyo for their second “offline meeting” under the wordy banner “Can I Make A Hundred Friends? Party For Men With No Chance of Receiving Chocolate and Girls With No One To Give it To”.

Several hundred shy virgins turned up for the first SNS event at Christmas and special allowances were made for the unique nature of the event — a social gathering for those who spurn society.

There was a poor-talkers’ zone for people who do not like to speak to or be spoken to by strangers, and another area where revellers could play computer games on their own. Several party-goers took advantage of the large paper bags with eye holes handed out at the door for those who felt uncomfortable showing their faces. The assembled himote erupted into applause when Mr Egami took the stage and offered a toast: “Ria-juu, Drop Dead!”

Couples, naturally, were banned from the event, as was anyone who looked a bit too smug. And despite the prohibition on any kind of romantic interaction, at least two participants paired off during the evening. “There was one couple who got together,” Mr Egami reported, disapprovingly. “But they were not experienced in relationships and so they broke up after just two hours.”

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