Hokkaidō Shrine, Hokkaido. October 2016

I found it!  I found a photo that matches exactly with this week’s photo challenge samples! XD  This photo was taken at the Hokkaidō Shrine in Sapporo, Hokkaido when I was travelling there in October last year (see blog post about the visit here).  I photographed these wishes in the shrine.  

I’m also just going to go ahead and copy and paste what Jen has written about these traditional wishes here from the challenge page:

Shinto is the dominant religion in Japan, though it is more of a way of life than a way to worship. … Visitors to Shinto shrines can purchase small wooden plaques called ema, upon which they can share their hopes and dreams. Then, they hang them amongst other ema from people who have come before them, in the hopes that spirits will grant their wish. I first encountered ema during a trip to Japan several years ago, displayed at Meiji Shrine in Tokyo. The ema were covered in myriad languages and sentiments …  (View original page here)

These ema that I saw were all written in Japanese so I unfortunately couldn’t understand what each wish said.  I have seen these before countless times when travelling in South Korea and also in Hong Kong.  I particularly like how they wrote the wishes on cute ema like these Japanese cartoon characters here. 🙂