What Is a Nengajo?
A nengajo (年賀状) is a Japanese New Year's postcard. Every year, people across Japan — families, friends, coworkers, businesses and their customers — exchange these cards so that they arrive on or around January 1. If Americans batch their card-sending into December holiday cards, Japan concentrates it into a single, precisely timed custom: the point is not the winter season in general but the new year specifically, and the cards are meant to land in the mailbox on New Year's morning.
What a typical card looks like
A standard nengajo is a plain postcard, usually featuring three things: a New Year's greeting (often a set phrase like kinga shinnen — see our guide to what the greetings mean), a short personal or printed message thanking the recipient for their kindness in the past year and asking for their continued goodwill, and frequently a design based on the zodiac animal of the incoming year. The twelve-year zodiac cycle gives designers a fresh theme annually — a year of the horse brings horses, a year of the snake brings snakes — and zodiac motifs are one of the most recognizable features of the genre, as the Nippon.com overview of nengajo customs describes.
Many cards are the official New Year's postcards sold by Japan Post, which come with postage prepaid and a lottery number printed along the bottom edge. That number enters the recipient into a national prize drawing held in January — a feature dating back to 1949, covered in our page on the nengajo lottery.
Who sends them, and to whom
The custom spans personal and professional life. Households send cards to relatives and friends; businesses send them to clients; students send them to teachers. A card is both a greeting and a quiet maintenance of the relationship — a once-a-year signal that the connection still stands. Because of that, the etiquette runs deeper than it first appears: there are conventions about when cards should arrive, how to write the address, and what to do in a year of mourning, when custom calls for refraining from celebratory greetings altogether.
Is the custom still alive?
Yes, though it is changing. Digital greetings sent by email or messaging apps have taken a growing share of New Year's communication, especially among younger people, and overall card volumes have declined from their peak — a shift Nippon.com's feature discusses. But the paper card retains real cultural weight, particularly for formal relationships and older recipients, and the tradition itself is far older than the postcard: the Postal Museum Japan's history of New Year's cards traces written New Year's greetings back to Japan's Heian period, roughly a thousand years ago.
If you're deciding whether to send a paper card, a photo card, or a digital greeting, our Nengajo Format Chooser compares the options side by side. And if you want the deeper story of how the custom evolved, start with our history of the nengajo.