Nengajo - the Japanese New Year's postcard

Have you received any nengajo? For me personally, I can say that I usually don’t get any because most friends will just send me a “Happy New Year” message via Line. I sometimes get nengajo from hair salons or shops but rather irregularly so that the most I ended up with so far was 3.

If you work for a Japanese company you probably have seen a small tower made of nengajo because companies tend to get a lot of these from business partners. In a previous job, one of my tasks was to organize the nengajo we received. There was a long Excel file with many company names and I had to put a checkmark for companies that send us nengajo and add new company names if they weren’t on the list yet.

If you ask me that was a waste of time and also a very boring task. In a digital setting, it would be much easier to do that and one could probably write software that completes this task automatically.

In the western world, you don’t send nengajo but it is rather common to send Christmas cards. Nowadays most companies have switched to sending their Christmas greeting via e-mail. I assume this trend has increased even more with the pandemic and rising numbers of people working from home. From my experience, the nengajo in Japan have not yet been hit by this trend.

In my current job, I am responsible for the design of the company nengajo and I realized that my bosses seem to take this really seriously. They ask for revisions and different drafts quite a lot compared to other design tasks that I am doing.

Based on the experience I had with organizing the nengajo I don’t really understand that because the nengajo never reach the persons in the higher positions. The person in charge of mail would put them all in a stack that would later be handed to me without anyone else looking at them. No matter how good your design is, no one will really look at it anyway.

Also, nengajo designs tend to be similar as most use illustrations of the zodiac of the new year and typical design elements, so it is hard to stick out in the mass of nengajo that companies receive, and as this is Japan you can’t really use unconventional designs to stick out either. After having seen 5 nengajo for a certain year you probably have seen all nengajo for that year.

Nengajo sold in a supermarket

One aspect I find interesting is that most nengajo come with a kind of lottery number attached to it. Sometimes in January, the Japanese post will announce a few numbers that are the winning numbers and if you received a nengajo with a winning number you can get a price. I have never won anything yet but I remember one year when my company got one of the smaller prices.

How is your experience with nengajo? Have you sent some to Japanese friends?

Have won anything in the nengajo lottery?