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Japanese New Year's Day Postcards
The Japanese have a custom of sending
New Year's Day postcards (Nengajo) to their friends and relatives. It is similar
to the custom of sending Christmas cards. Instead of sending Christmas cards,
Japanese people send these postcards so that they arrive on the 1st of January.
The post office guarantees to deliver the greeting postcards on the first of
January if they are marked with the words nengajo and are posted within a time
limit, from mid-December to near the end of the month. In order to send these
cards on time, the post office usually hires students part-time to help deliver
the letters. The end of December and the beginning of January are the busiest
times for the Japanese post office.
It is customary not to send postcards
when one has had a death in the family during the year. In this case, a simple
postcard is sent instead to inform friends and relatives that they should not
send joyful New Year's cards, in order to show respect for the dead in Japan.
Although these New Year's cards have become a widely-observed custom, their
original purpose was to give your faraway friends and relatives tidings of yourself
and your immediate family. In a manner of speaking, this custom exists for people
to tell others whom they do not often meet that they are alive and well. Most
of the postcards have the Chinese zodiac sign of the new year as their design.
This has a cycle of 12 years. Each year is represented by an animal. The animals
are, in order: mouse, cow, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey,
rooster, dog, and boar. The year 2006 is the dog, and 2007 will be the boar. |
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People get their nengajoo from many sources.
Stationers sell preprinted cards. Many of these have conventional greetings
or the animal of the year (or both). For 2006, famous dogs like Snoopy and other
cartoon characters were especially popular. They may have spaces for the sender
to write a personal message. Blank cards are available, and people can hand-write
or draw their own. Rubber stamps with conventional messages and with the annual
animal are on sale at department stores and other outlets, and many people buy
fountain brushes for personal greetings. Special printing devices are popular,
especially among people who practice crafts. Software also lets artists create
their own designs and output them using their computer's color printer. Because
a gregarious individual might have hundreds to write, print shops offer a wide
variety of sample postcards with short messages so that the sender has only
to write addresses. Even with the rise in popularity of email, the nengajoo
remains very popular in Japan. |
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Typical nengajo greetings
include :
kotoshi mo yoroshiku o-negai-shimasu
- I hope for your favour in the coming year.
akemashite o-medeto-gozaimasu - New
Year's congratulations.
kinga shinnen - Happy New Year.
shoshun - literally "early spring". |
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Otoshidama
On New Year's Day, Japanese people have
a custom of giving pocket money to children. This is known as otoshidama, which
is a custom from China. It is handed out in small decorated envelopes called
'pochibukuro', descendants of the Chinese red packet. In the Edo period, large
stores and wealthy families gave out a small bag of mochi and a Mandarin orange
to spread happiness all around. The amount of money given depends on the age
of the child but is usually the same if there is more than one child so that
no one feels slighted. |
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Mochi
Another custom of the Japanese is creating
rice cakes. Boiled mochigome (sticky rice) is put in to a wooden shallow bucket-like
container and patted with water by one person while another person hits it with
a large wooden hammer. By mashing the rice, it gets sticky and forms a sticky
white dumpling. This is made before New Year's Day and eaten during the beginning
of January.
Mochi is also made into a New Year's
decoration called kagami mochi, formed from two round cakes of mochi with a
daidai (bitter orange) placed on top. The name of the daidai is supposed to
be auspicious since it means "several generations". |
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Japanese New Year and Poetry
The New Year traditions are also a part
of Japanese poetry, including haiku and renga. All of the traditions above would
be appropriate to include in haiku as kigo (season words). There also haiku
that celebrate many of the "first" of the New Year, such as the "first
sun" (hatsuhi) or "first sunrise", "first laughter"
(waraizome — starting the New Year with a smile is considered a good sign),
and first dream (hatsuyume). Since the traditional new year was later in the
year than the current date, many of these mention the beginnings of spring.
Along with the New Year's Day Postcard,
haiku might mention "first letter" (hatsudayori — meaning the
first exchange of letters), "first calligraphy" (kakizome), and "first
brush" (fude hajime). |
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Games
It is also the custom of Japanese to
play New Year's games: hanetsuki, takoage (kite flying), koma (top), sugoroku,
fukuwarai (A blindfold person places paper parts of a face (eyes, eyebrows,
a nose and a mouth) on a paper face.), karuta, and so on. |
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