The Wishing Boards

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I forget if this was at a Shinto shrine or Buddhist temple or what combination of those words, but I’m going to guess this was a Buddhist temple.  Anyway, there was a huge rack in the middle of a clearing, and on it in a latticed layout were boards with prayers and wishes on them.  They were stacked about 10 deep at each point on the lattice.  If you made a donation to the place, you could write your wishes on a board and a monk would pray for your wishes to come true.

 

Some of the wishes were in English, so I read a couple of them.  None of them were particularly interesting.  It wasn’t nearly as post-secret-esque as I had anticipated.  A lot of them asked for financial success.  I wondered what all of the Japanese ones said, and if maybe they were more post-secret-esque.  I doubted it though.  If the English people who travelled all the way here were wishing for financial success, I could only imagine what the not-so-lucky people who lived in Japan would be wishing for.

 

I thought about putting my favorite xkcd reference in there for a few dollars, but I didn’t think it was worth it.  That, of course, would be “I wish that I had missed you then so I wouldn’t be missing you now.”  But I don’t really wish that, so I don’t want a monk to pray for it.  And I couldn’t think of anything else I really wished for and wanted a monk to help me with, so I just didn’t wish for anything at all.