How Much Would People Throw Into Offertory Boxes At Shinto Shrines And Temples In Japan?

I introduced about how people make wishes at Japanese Shinto shrines and temples in my previous post on October 5th. Basically you can make a wish at each building worshiping gods or Buddhism statues with a offertory box. Then you might wonder how much people spent for a Shinto shrine/Buddhism temple during one visit when people make a wish many times there.

Of course people throw money every time when they make a wish even inside of one shrine/temple. Does it accumulate to be a certain amount of money at the end? Do people usually think paying more at offertory boxes would be better? 

Actually there is an amount of money Japanese people prefer to throw into offertory boxes when they make a wish. It is a five yen coin, which is about 5 cents in current exchange rate. So, even if they make a wish 10 times at a shrine/temple during a visit, it's just 50 yen (50 cents) for total. Thus most people don't worry about the offertory money and enjoy visiting shrines/temples to make a wish many times. 

The reason why people prefer 5 yen coins when they make a wish, is the Japanese word "Go-en (5 Yen)" has a homonym which means "a good destiny". The pronunciations are completely same, and people just use different characters when they write down.  With this coincidence, 5 yen coins are considered as a good luck item since old times. 

I'm showing the coin in the photos above. It is a golden color coin with a hole. As you can see the head and the tail of the design, it is actually only coin which is written by all Kanji characters (Chinese characters). The characters "五円" under the design of a ear of rice shown on the lower left end photo means "5 Yen".

In addition, when people visit shrines/temples, people also enjoy buying votive wooden tablet to write down their wishes and lucky charms as  you can see in the photos. Since most people throw just five yen to each offertory box, they don't mind to spend several hundreds yen (several dollars) more for these items. Moreover many of lucky charms have cute designs then people even buy them as accessories.

However, you can also use a five yen coin as a lucky charm/souvenir from Japan since it is also a good luck item and looks very Japanese since there is no alphabets nor Arabic numbers in the design. In fact some Japanese people use it as a lucky charm as you can see the photo below!