The first time I was a 22-year-old senior at university as an exchange student in Tokyo. Our Japanese friend invited us to spend the New Year holidays with him and his family in Kyoto. My friend and I hitchhiked there and were driven almost immediately all the way. Boy, those were exciting days. I even saw monkeys raiding an orchard and jumping on the neighbor’s roof. That’s weird.

We ended up at a famous shrine around midnight on New Year’s Eve. It was so crowded that you couldn’t, or rather you couldn’t walk. The crowd pushed you closer and closer to the shrine. If it hadn’t been Japan, I think I would have been alarmed.

Everyone was throwing coins of five yen (which is considered good luck) or more at the shrine. Because I was tall, I was repeatedly hit on the head and all I can say is that it hurt a lot more than it looks. I began to wonder if some people weren’t aiming at my head and if I should have put on a hood to catch the coins.

Many years later, on New Year’s Day, I found myself in a similar situation at a Fukuoka shrine. Only this time he wasn’t in the maddening crowd throwing coins in a frenzy, but on the outskirts. My brother-in-law gave me a 5 yen coin to throw into the shrine. Calculating the distance, I figured I’d have to throw it pretty hard and at a pretty high angle to do it. I took aim and let it rip, but to my horror, instead of arcing through the sun like those guys do with their arrows in the movies, it went flying forward, straight into the crowd. I punched a poor guy right in the back of the head just 10 meters from me.

“What are you doing? You’re not supposed to throw it like that with all your might!” my brother-in-law rebuked me. The guy I hit kept looking around him and rubbing his head; it seemed to hurt quite a bit. I whispered an apology and promised myself to stay away from those coin tossing rituals from now on.