Your lucky coin

This is Japan’s lucky coin.

Five yen buys nothing, it is loose change. But in Japan this is the one you give away, the one you keep in your wallet, and the one you take to the shrine when you make a wish.

It has three good things packed into it. Here they are, quickly.

In Japanese, “five yen” sounds exactly like “a good connection”.

Two different words, one sound: go-en. And Japanese people use that coincidence every chance they get.

So this is the coin you toss into the offering box at a shrine when you make a wish: letting it go is asking for go-en — for the right people to cross your path.

A coin that buys nothing, spent on asking for good people.

Almost no coin in the world has a hole.

Think of every coin you have ever held: solid discs, all of them. Coins with a real hole through the middle are down to a handful — Japan, and up in northern Europe, Norway and Denmark. That is where the list ends.

And in Japan they say that is exactly why it brings luck: you can see the future through that hole. You look through it and the road ahead comes out clear.

Try it right now: hold it up to the light and look through the hole.

Around the hole are three wishes for good fortune.

No kings, no monuments. What is engraved is people’s work:

Farming, industry and fishing: the three trades that put food on the table. And on the back, two sprouts just opening — something starting to grow.

They have been on the coin since 1949. It is a coin that comes with a wish already built in: that things go well.

That wish is yours now.