Interest
Manga, Evangelion Creators Draw New Year's Cards
posted on by Gia Manry
Artists Tomoko Ninomiya (Nodame Cantabile), Shūichi Shigeno (Initial D), Masayuki Ishikawa (Moyashimon), Minoru Furuya (Ping Pong Club), Yuki Suetsugu (Chihayafuru), the Evangelion creators, and others have collaborated with the Japanese social networking site mixi to offer New Year's cards for the site's users. Users can ship them to anyone on their friends' list, even if they don't know that person's real name or address, for a fee of 180 yen (about US$2.15) per card.
The studio Khara is offering a separate service with Yahoo! Japan in which the fans themselves receive cards from the production staff of the current four-part Evangelion film remake. Over 30 different styles are available.
For generations, people in Japan have celebrated New Year's Day by sending specially designed cards — nengajō — to each other. As part of the tradition, postal workers store all the nengajō that are mailed in the final weeks of the old year, and then deliver every single one on New Year's Day. Numerous anime nengajo are released in stores for the occasion; examples can be seen here and here.
Sources: Comic Natalie via Fanboy.com, Bandai Channel
