We started out today with a report about a post office in Utsunomiya that mistakenly delivered New Year’s postcards about a week early. They ended up trying to retrieve the cards for re-delivery on January 1, which is the custom in Japan.

So what’s a better way to end the day than a revelation that an Osaka post office will be delivering 35 New Year’s postcards a year late?

It seems that a post office worker preparing a shelf for this year’s postal onslaught came across the undelivered cards that had lain there since the beginning of 2005.

“We’ll visit the senders of these cards to apologize for the blunder. There is no room for making any excuses,” an official of the Japan Post’s Kinki branch said.

The blunder occurred at Neyagawa Post Office in Nayagawa, Osaka Prefecture, the officials said.