New Year's card

A small-format print intended as a nengajo, the traditional Japanese New Year greeting card, a genre with deep roots in the [surimono](/glossary/surimono) tradition of privately commissioned Edo-period woodblock prints and one that [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists continued throughout the twentieth century. Such cards typically combine a seasonal or zodiac motif — an animal of the coming year, a pine branch, plum blossom, or auspicious object — with a brief inscription, all carved and printed by the artist for distribution to friends, collectors, and fellow printmakers. The reduced scale of a nengajo concentrates technical decisions: a narrow palette, careful registration across two or three blocks, and a single clear image read at small size. For Ono, New Year cards formed part of the sustained, year-by-year output that ran alongside his larger exhibition prints and his historical writing on sosaku-hanga, and they document the social network of exchanges that bound the creative-print community together over his fifty-year career.