The illustrated ema at Washinomiya, and the pilgrimage notebooks kept on shop counters

Washinomiya-jinja, a few minutes on foot from a small station in Kuki, Saitama, is an ordinary country shrine for most of the year: gravel, old cedars, a stone torii nobody in the neighbourhood can date. The difference is the rack beside the hall, where a good share of the wooden prayer plaques carry drawings.

Where the drawings hang

Ema (絵馬) are palm-sized cedar boards sold at the shrine office. You write on the blank side, tie it to the rack, and leave it out in the weather until the shrine collects and burns the year's accumulation. Across Japan they carry the same freight — entrance exams, a safe birth, a grandmother's knees. At Washinomiya, since a 2007 television series set its shrine family here, a portion are drawn as well as written: characters in ballpoint and marker, some inked with real care, some finished in four lines on the walk up from the platform.

Nobody sorts them. A drawing hangs beside a request for work in Ōmiya, and both take the same rain. That is the part worth the trip — not the pilgrimage, but the evidence that the town absorbed it without ceremony and kept its January routine intact.

絵馬に書かれるのは願いごとで、絵の上手下手は誰も見ていない。

The notebook on the counter

The same habit turns up indoors. In Ōarai in Ibaraki, in Numazu in Shizuoka, in cafés near stretches of pavement that appeared on screen for eleven seconds, there is often a ring-bound notebook next to the register — a junrei nōto (巡礼ノート), a pilgrimage notebook. Visitors write the date, the city they travelled from, and a line.

The convention is brevity. Entries run to a sentence, sometimes a small sketch, and increasingly in Thai, Mandarin, and English alongside Japanese. Reading a few pages back tells you more about who comes here than any visitor count: mostly people alone, mostly on a weekday, mostly passing through on the way somewhere else.

How to visit without making it strange

Buy something. The notebook belongs to a business, and the coffee is the rent. Ask before photographing an interior, and skip the shop that has no notebook rather than asking for one.

At the shrine, the ordinary rules hold: rinse your hands at the temizuya (手水舎), keep clear of the centre of the path, and don't linger in front of the offering hall while someone is waiting. Early January is hatsumōde (初詣) and the approach runs shoulder to shoulder for days. A weekday in late spring or autumn gets you the racks to yourself.