Photo/Illutration A man putting a New Year’s card in the mailbox. (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

In 1908, Takuboku Ishikawa (1886-1912), a poet born in Iwate Prefecture, sent a brush-written “nengajo” (New Year’s greeting card) to the linguist Kyosuke Kindaichi (1882-1971), a fellow Iwate native.

“Best wishes for a happy new year,” Ishikawa began in a twisty hand with a gentle touch.

I saw it at the Mori Ogai Memorial Museum in Tokyo, where a special exhibition titled “111-mai no Hagaki no Sekai” (literally, the world of 111 postcards”) is being held until next month.

Ishikawa went on: “The winter is cold in the northern coastal town where my wanderings have brought me. I am guilty, many times over, for not writing sooner.”

The poet was 21 years old at the time, drifting from one newspaper company to another in the northernmost main island of Hokkaido.

It felt to me as if his sense of desolation was wafting slowly from the yellowed postcard.

Why is it that handwritten words can be so powerful? Even with a bland, printed New Year’s greeting card, all it takes to make it intimate is just one handwritten line from the sender, like “How are you doing?”

Fine handwriting is nice, but unformed scrawls are so full of personality, they are irreplaceable. Such is the charm of handwritten messages.

And precisely for this reason, I was stunned by the results of a recent opinion survey by The Asahi Shimbun.

Asked how many New Year’s greeting cards they were sending out, a majority of respondents--57 percent--said they “aren’t sending any.”

Since the corresponding number was 33 percent five years ago, the move away from physical greeting cards must have progressed rapidly in just a few years.

In the same survey, nearly 60 percent of respondents said “emails and social media posts are good enough” for New Year’s wishes. And among young people aged 18 to 29, that number was a whopping 80 percent.

Is the culture of exchanging postcards on its way to extinction? “How sad,” I mumble to myself.

Today is the winter solstice already. Let me remind my fellow non-digital New Year’s greeting card senders--who have become a minority--that the sooner they get it done, the better.

A poem by Ishikawa goes to the effect, “The precious words that I failed to tell you the last time/ Are still in my heart.”

With the year winding down, I am feeling oddly sentimental.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 21

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Vox Populi, Vox Dei is a popular daily column that takes up a wide range of topics, including culture, arts and social trends and developments. Written by veteran Asahi Shimbun writers, the column provides useful perspectives on and insights into contemporary Japan and its culture.

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