How Old Is the Nengajo Tradition?
The nengajo feels like a postcard-era custom, and in its familiar form it is — but the practice it grew from is roughly a thousand years old. Understanding the layers helps explain why the modern card carries so much convention with it.
Written New Year's greetings before the postcard
The custom of exchanging New Year's greetings in writing goes back to Japan's Heian period (794–1185), when people who could not pay a New Year's visit in person began sending written greetings instead. The Postal Museum Japan's curated history of the nengajo traces this long arc: the greeting-by-letter substituted for the greeting-in-person, and that substitution is still visible in the modern card's function. A nengajo today does the work of a courtesy call — it acknowledges the relationship at the year's most formally marked moment.
For centuries this remained a practice of letters among those with the literacy and means to send them. What transformed it into a mass custom was the modern postal system.
The postal era
Japan established its modern postal service in the early Meiji period, and the introduction of the postcard gave the New Year's greeting a cheap, standardized vehicle. Volumes grew so large that the post office developed special handling for New Year's mail, accepting cards in advance for delivery timed to the new year — the origin of today's familiar December mailing window, described in our guide to when to send nengajo. The set greetings that decorate cards, such as kinga shinnen (謹賀新年), also spread in this era of printed cards; Japan's National Diet Library maintains a librarian-researched reference on when that phrase first appeared on New Year's cards, and our greetings guide covers what the phrases mean.
1949: the lottery card
The single biggest innovation in the card's modern history came in 1949, when Japan introduced New Year's postcards with lottery prize numbers printed on them — the otoshidama-tsuki nengajo. The idea, launched in the difficult years after the war, was a card that carried a small chance of a prize along with its greeting, and it was an enormous success. The Postal Museum's account covers the introduction of these lottery cards, and they remain the standard official New Year's postcard today. We explain how the drawing works in our page on the numbers at the bottom of the card.
The card today
At its peak the nengajo was a near-universal custom, with billions of cards moving through the mail each season. Volumes have declined in the digital era as email and messaging apps absorb casual greetings — a trend the Nippon.com feature on nengajo discusses — but the paper card persists, especially for formal and business relationships. A thousand years of precedent turns out to be durable.
If the history has you wanting to take part, start with what a nengajo is and our format comparison tool.