Examples of New Year’s greetings cards from 2009
New Year’s is a big holiday in Japan, and part of the tradition is sending New Year’s cards to friends, relatives, and associates. As people prepare their cards this month, an ongoing controversy has resurfaced on the internet: is it bad taste to send a card with a picture of just your children? With the Japanese birthrate continuing to decline, anything related to children can easily become a sensitive topic.
Some say that sending pictures of your kids to unhappily childless friends is rubbing salt in the wound, although there have also been accusations of oversensitivity. Others say they’re simply not interested in pictures of children they’ve never met, and some netizens have also raised concerns about privacy issues relating to sending postcards with kids’ pictures through the mail.
Will you think twice about sending out a family picture for the holidays this year?
From Yahoo! Japan:
“What’s So Bad About It?” The Pros and Cons of Putting Children’s Pictures in New Year’s Cards – Increasingly Heated Debate Due to Smartphone Apps
Every year, the dispute surrounding the pros and cons of using children’s pictures in New Year’s cards heats up again as December approaches. On the internet, the two sides progress in parallel, with some welcoming the practice as “charming” and others criticizing a lack of consideration with comments such as, “Some people can’t have children.” The spread of smartphones and New Year’s card apps have made it easier to create New Year’s cards that include pictures, and because the number of cards that have pictures is definitely increasing, it seems the debate will grow more and more heated. Could there possibly be a solution that both parties in this debate will accept?
■ The Opposing Party: “I don’t know your kids!”
Tanaka Keiko (pseudonym), a Tokyo company worker in her 40s who has one child from a late marriage, says that when she was struggling to conceive a second child, she felt depressed to receive New Year’s cards with pictures of children happily lined up with their siblings.
“I really felt down about it. I had discussed my problems with a female friend who gave birth to her first child after being treated for infertility, and after we lost touch for a while, I saw from her New Year’s card that she had a second child. It made me reflect on the fact that I had also sent my cards out with a picture of my child.”
Despite these comments, this year she still plans on using a picture of her family taken at the Shichi-Go-San Festival.
“When I was single I would make fun of it and say “I have absolutely no interest in your children!” but once I got married and had a child of my own, I got all excited and made cards with pictures. It’s annoying, isn’t it? But I end up doing it anyway.”
The question of whether including pictures of your children is right or wrong has been an unresolved topic for many years. Especially when it comes to New Year’s cards that use pictures of just the children, there have consistently been people who are uncomfortable with it.
Yamada Hiroshi (pseudonym), a Saitama Prefecture company worker in his 50s, is one of those people. He says, “I can’t help but wonder what on earth the intention is when someone shows me a picture of kids that I haven’t met even once. If it’s a picture of them with their family, I just think, ‘Wow, they’ve gotten old too!’ I probably think this way because I don’t have kids myself.”
Ito Yuko (pseudonym), a Tokyo company worker in her 30s, also has complicated feelings about New Year’s cards. Ito is single, and many of her female friends are also unmarried. She sighed, “I have friends who stopped sending New Year’s cards themselves because they were sick of seeing all the marriage notices right after the New Year. Those who send New Year’s cards with a picture they took by themselves on a vacation abroad are usually single. As the years pass, the setting tends to get more and more secluded.”
She sometimes feels angry at pictures of just the children: “I want to tell them, ‘I don’t know your kids!’ It’s only the parents who think they’re cute. It doesn’t matter that their intentions are good. If it’s a kid that I know, then I just think about how big they’ve gotten and it makes me think about my own age. New Year’s cards with just a picture and no handwritten message are particularly problematic. If there’s even just a brief comment attached then you can at least feel like they put some thought into it.”
■ The Supporting Party: “If you don’t know the circumstances, it’s impossible to be considerate.”
On the other hand, Suzuki Hiroyuki (pseudonym), a Tokyo businessman in his 40s who sends New Year’s cards with pictures of just his kids every year, said without hesitation, “It’s a New Year’s greeting and report on our current circumstances, so I don’t see what’s wrong with reporting, ‘This is how much our kids have grown.’”
Suzuki explains that you don’t have to send it out to those with whom you have a more formal relationship: “If it seems like they’ll be mad about a picture of your kids, then that says something about the degree of your relationship. Our intention is not to brag about our good fortune. The feeling is that we want to send you good wishes for the New Year as a family.”
If you examine the controversy in the past, it’s clear that not everyone who receives pictures of children feel happy to see how much they’ve grown – there are also people who feel depressed to see these pictures so soon after New Year’s, thinking, “This is unpleasant for an unmarried person like me,” or, “I can’t believe they’d send this while I’m in the middle of infertility treatment.” Suzuki does not hesitate to sympathize with those who feel that way, but he objects, “If I knew each person’s personal situation, then of course I would be considerate of that. But it’s impossible to try to guess how people will feel without knowing the circumstances. I feel like, ‘I can’t take responsibility for your whole lives.’”
Ueda Yukiko (pseudonym), a Tokyo businesswoman in her 40s, says that her mother, who lives alone, uses a picture of her surrounded by her grandchildren every year. Ueda helps take the picture, saying, “I guess you could say she’s bragging about her good fortune, but if I say it’s wrong then it’s like I’m denying my mother’s life, which would be terrible.”
■ Smartphone Apps Make it Even Easier
New Year’s cards with pictures have been around for a while, but right now it’s easier than ever to make them. Since last season, more apps have come out that let you use pictures you took with your smartphone to easily make a New Year’s card.
There are also apps that help you deal with everything from design to printing and even mailing your cards, without using a professional printer. There are plenty of increasingly popular templates that automatically arrange the layout of the photos, so it seems that the practice of including pictures in the cards will continue to increase.
For parents, it’s simply a matter of wanting to use cute pictures of their children. It seems like it must be difficult to avoid causing some discomfort at times.
■ Expert: “You should also prepare something between official and personal, and use each properly.”
Miura Yasuko, author of the comprehensive lifestyle website All About’s “Seasonal Almanac of Life” Guide, points out, “New Years’ cards with pictures are not uniformly bad. It’s OK as long as they match the feelings of the person receiving them. If you forget to be sympathetic, it can seem like you’re bragging about your good fortune. You should be careful, because if you just make it about yourself, you can lose the essential meaning of the New Year’s card.”
According to Miura, the origin of the tradition of sending New Year’s cards was to send a New Year’s greeting in order to share the joy of getting through the past year safely and welcoming the New Year. Visiting with New Year’s合理的greetings became a custom among samurai households, then spread to the general public. People began sending New Year’s cards to those who were too far away to visit. For this reason, we write messages celebrating the New Year, giving thanks for the past year, and hoping for the happiness of the recipient.
Simply put, New Year’s cards today have become a tool for confirming our bonds with others and deepening intimacy. Even joking New Year’s cards are fine as long as they are for the enjoyment of the recipient. The important thing is consideration for the person you’re sending it to.
Regarding worries concerning the content of the New Year’s cards, Miura says, “I think this has its roots in the rational concept that it’s easy to send everyone the same thing. In the old days people would call each recipient to mind, and write each New Year’s card accordingly. Logic and consideration are separate. It’s the same as ordinary socializing.”
Nonetheless, writing every card by hand takes time and is difficult to accomplish in reality. Therefore, Miura recommends a method of adding a few handwritten words to each, and changing your greeting according to the person you’re writing to. Just that small step changes the overall impression considerably. She advises, “In addition to cards for personal use and official use, it’s helpful to prepare a New Year’s card that’s somewhere in between the two.”
As for the long-awaited easy to make New Year’s cards with photos included? This season, it might be a good idea to make cards in a variety of patterns, and send different ones according to the person.
Comments from Yahoo! Japan:
aau*****:
I don’t do it myself, but I don’t understand why people are getting scolded so much over it. It’s not like you have to frame it and put it on the wall, it’s just something you get and look at one and then you’re done. As for things like hurting someone’s feelings because they’re undergoing infertility treatment, if you say this is wrong then you have to start finding fault with and limiting everything and anything related to children. I understand the suffering of not being able to have children, but don’t you think it’s a little wrong to force everyone else to sympathize with that? It’s a situation that could be resolved just by saying “Ah, you guys look so happy” and leaving it at that. You need to be careful about matters involving personal information and so forth, but it’s not like you’re just scattering them among strangers. Don’t you think Facebook is more dangerous than this?
日本男児:
It’s not that it’s good or bad, it’s just that we don’t have any interest in other people’s children.
kun*****:
I don’t really have a problem with including pictures of children, but honestly I don’t really have any sort of affection or thoughts for children that I only see in photographs once a year. Maybe if the parent that I know is also in the picture with them then there’s more of a feeling of “Oh wow, they’re a parent now!”
詐欺首相安倍＠国民はアンダーコントロール:
Infertile people get depressed when they look at pictures of families?… If they also get depressed seeing families walking around together downtown, then the New Year’s card isn’t really the problem, is it?
i46*****:
Well, I’m not so sure about sending New Year’s cards with pictures of your family to your boss or your clients. But isn’t it okay to send them to friends and relatives? I don’t have kids either, and due to my age the chance that I’ll ever have one is pretty low, but when I look at pictures of my friends’ children, it actually just makes me happy. I also have fun buying baby supplies for my friends’ baby showers, too… Infertility is a problem between husband and wife, so I think it’s a little weird to expect those around you to concern themselves with it. If you start thinking that way, won’t you have trouble going out at all?
ayu*****:
I guess we’ve come to an age where people really worry this much about making and sending New Year’s cards. Isn’t that just proof that the world is full of more narrow-minded whiny people than ever? Just say thanks for the past year and looking forward to the next. It doesn’t have to be such a big discussion…
nob*****:
It’s a problem to use the values of people with persecution complexes as the standard. I think it’s inconsiderate to send one to someone who has made it public that they’re undergoing infertility treatment, but people who say things like people must be going through infertility treatment just because they’re a couple who doesn’t have a kid or something should just resolve this on their own.
k34*****:
Even if I get a New Year’s card that has a picture of just the child and not my friend (the parent), I don’t really think anything of it. I just think something like, ah, seems like they’re doing well and raising their child. But at New Year’s this year, I happened to see a New Year’s card that was sent to my mother… Along with pictures of their child in various settings, the card had a detailed list of all their kid’s accomplishments of the past year (got chosen for the soccer team, won X prize in a writing competition, passed Y level on the English proficiency test, etc…) That sort of caught my attention (笑)
bfc*****:
I think the main source of the problem is sending New Year’s cards out of obligation to people you don’t actually know that well.
cat*****:
I personally have never really felt mad about this. These kinds of pictures tend to get more scarce once the kid gets bigger anyways (at the latest, they only send them through middle or high school), and actually the New Year’s cards I’ve been receiving these days have luckily just had writing and illustrations.
ポンけつ:
Well, this seems just like how when people ride bikes they think cars are dangerous, but when that same person gets in a car they start to think that the bikes are irritating. In the end, the scolding just means that that person is narrow-minded, doesn’t it?
moc*****:
If you start saying stuff like this, than it seems like for pictures of couples or families you would also have to say “But there are people who can’t get married!” I’ve also heard of people who are undergoing infertility treatment hating pregnant women who wear pregnancy badges, but is really necessary to worry so much about other people? Japanese people are concerned with picking up on subtleties, but recently it’s going too far. I don’t need the kind of relationship that requires that much attention.
yuj***** :
I think it’s fine to have pictures of children, but I’d like them to also include a picture of the person you actually know. I’d rather not be shown just a kid I’ve never met.
gar*****:
People send ones with pictures to their friends who have children, and send ones without pictures to their friends who are going through infertility treatment. But I think that might be even more rude. If a friend who doesn’t know the situation and received one with pictures brings it up and says “Did you see that picture? It was so cute,” then the other person has to say “The card I got didn’t have it.” If it’s a negative time for them, they might think, “I guess this means she really fussed over this.”
at*****:
Among my friends, everyone who has a small child includes pictures. Normally I’m interested in the pictures and I enjoy it. But in terms of the personal information, it’s pretty to scary to think that it might get abused.
k93*****:
I think there are really hardly any people who are against this. Doesn’t this article just make it seem like there are both pros and cons by introducing one extreme example?
＊＊:
I don’t think anyone’s really in the wrong here. It’s just, people aren’t really interested in getting pictures of kids other than the children of their close friends. Is there something wrong with not being interested?
ichinisan:
This is off topic, but I don’t think we need New Year’s cards in the first place.
red*****:
Recently there have been so many of these stupid articles, what happened Yahoo Japan… This issue doesn’t matter…
kat***** :
If they show you how much the child grew each year, then you’ll feel close to them… there are like 3 people who actually think that…
