Nengajo: The Cards Japan Delivers All on January 1st — Epoche A2
December 18th, Thursday Today the section chief put a list on my desk: forty-one client companies, and a box of blank New Year cards. In Japan a company thanks its clients for the year with these cards, nengajo. Nobody taught us this at university. The problem: I thought a card posted in December simply arrives in December. Wrong. Tanaka-san explained the system to me. From December 15th the post office collects the New Year cards but does not deliver them. It holds every card in the country, and then delivers all of them together on the morning of January 1st. Post by about the 25th, she said, and the card will be in the client's first post of the year. Post later, and it may arrive on the 3rd, which looks careless. So this week has a real deadline, and the post box near the station already shows it: in December it grows an extra slot, marked "nengajo only". My plan is ten cards a night, with the addresses by hand, because Tanaka-san says clients notice a handwritten address. Each card also carries a lottery number at the bottom, and the winners are drawn in mid-January. Ten cards done tonight. My hand hurts, and it is only Thursday.