Can I buy nengajo outside Japan?

I want to buy blank nengajo’s for this year, but I am not the resident of Japan (actually I live in Belarus, Minsk). Is it possible to order them on-line and be send to me? Or can anybody help me to obtain them (all expenses are mine of course ;))? By the way when do the sales begin?

Every year we find many wonderful newer and older designs on the internet. You will need a laser printer and a post card type papers. Doing it on-line is a hassle free -

Try these........... or search for others........
http://www.bouncingredball.com/2008/12/23/get-your-2009-year-of-the-ox...
waterbaby.vox.com/.../6a00cdf7e63a7a094f0109d0f9ffa6000f.html

TMia,

You are looking for a BLANK un-used 50 yen per piece nenga-hagaki with a stamp printed on it, just like this one, am I correct?
http://www.yubin-nenga.jp/products/plane.html

If so, once you've received the blank cards and have written some greetings on it, how would you send it and what for? What I mean is, are you going to put Belarus stamps over the yen stamps and air mail the cards to Japan? Just for the lottery perhaps. That doesn't sound very practical, hence I doubt there will be anyone selling nenga-hagaki for that purpose.

Maybe someone can give you some better suggestions depending on what you need it for.

Uco, you are right - BLANK un-used 50 yen per piece nenga-hagaki (in amount of 10-12). And yes they will be again posted to Japan. I know it sounds weird and unpractical but the satiation is the following – I do write nenga’s every year for my Japaneese friends (as well as receive some from them), but my nenga’s are not the originals (..Belarusian handmade nenga, to my mind, is not the same…). So this year I wanted to do everything right. And I thought that anybody knew where it is possible to buy them (I guess online – because i will use credit card or another payment method) and then be placed in an envelope and shipped to me. Thanks in advance for any ideas.

TMia,

You realize that the postage (50 yen per piece) would not be valid when you try to send them from where you are back to someone in Japan, as Uco described? You will be wasting that 50 yen per card.

The only way it makes sense for me is that if you *definitely* want to send Japanese "nengajo" to your 10 or so friends in Japan, then you write the 10 cards, then place them in an envelope together and send the package to *one* of your friends, asking him/her to post them again individually (then the 50 yen will be useful).

To myself, a Japanese resident, "nengajo" is just one form of New Year's greetings, and while I've always found it amusing that they are actually posted before the end of the year and that they come with lottery numbers, but that's about it - your handwritten greetings would delight your friends in Japan all the more because they are handmade and hand-written!

Japan Post sells them, but considering that they are meant to be posted within Japan, I don't think any mail order to addresses outside Japan is available. :(

As AK mentioned, that's what my friend used to do when she lived overseas. She would let her family in Japan buy a bundle of blank nenga-hagaki and have them send to her in one envelope. Then she'd write greetings on them, and then send them back in one envelope to her family, so that her family can take out the hagaki from the envelope and throw them into a public mail box.

But personally, I prefer to get folded style season's greetings cards from friends overseas. They are about the only non-nengajo cards I get each year, and I enjoy the exotic designs on each cover. And while the tens or hundreds of negajo are bundled in one and kept in my drawer, the foreign cards stand out and are decorated on my shelf for a couple of months, sometimes for the whole year depending on the design.

Uco and AK, thank you very much for your answers. You helped me to realize the fact that the nengajos posted from overseas wont be valid to participate in the lottery. I never considered this fact. I thought that it was not fear that i receive cards with lottery numbers and my cards to friends will not participate in the lottery. So I will continue to send hand-made cards for my friends. And each one indeed will be one of a kind.