On April 4, 2026, the news aggregator @livedoornews posted a summary of an FNN Prime Online report about a growing problem at Oshino Hakkai (忍野八海), a UNESCO World Heritage site in Yamanashi Prefecture fed by underground snowmelt from Mt. Fuji. Foreign tourists — primarily under the misconception that coin-throwing into water brings good luck — have been tossing coins into the nationally designated natural monument pools at an accelerating rate. Volunteer divers retrieved roughly 4,400 coins in 2024. In 2025, that number jumped to approximately 18,000, a fourfold increase in a single year.
The original FNN report described the scene: signs in four languages explicitly prohibiting coin-throwing are posted beside the pools, yet visitors continue regardless. Tourists interviewed on camera — one from Australia, one from Los Angeles — said they threw coins “to make a wish” or “for good luck,” having seen coins already in the pool and assumed the custom was welcomed. The misunderstanding appears to stem from the global practice of wishing wells and fountains, where coin-throwing is actively encouraged.
Village authorities are responding with a creative solution rather than a purely punitive one. Using hometown tax crowdfunding (furusato nozei), they plan to install a dedicated collection box styled like a traditional Shinto offertory box (saisen-bako) near the pools during fiscal year 2026. The idea is to redirect the impulse — give visitors somewhere to put their wish-money — while keeping the coins out of the ecologically sensitive water. Coins collected would go toward environmental conservation at the site. Several Japanese bystanders interviewed in the report responded positively to the proposal, with one comparing it to making a donation at a shrine.
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The environmental stakes are real. Coins corroding in water leach rust and trace metals that can affect water quality and the delicate ecosystem that has made Oshino Hakkai famous for its exceptional clarity. Overtourism pressure at natural and heritage sites across Japan has been building for years, and this case illustrates how even well-intentioned visitors can cause environmental harm through cultural misreading.
2024 to 2025
by divers in 2025
The single most-liked comment cut to the practical heart of the problem in a way that the news article itself missed: as long as coins are visibly sitting in the pool, visitors will interpret that as permission to throw more. This framing recast the issue from one of individual bad behavior to one of environmental design. The implication is that even well-intentioned warning signs are fighting an uphill battle against a visual cue that tells a contradictory story. Several other commenters built on this thread, with one noting explicitly that the collection box plan, while good, would only work if the pools were first completely cleared. The argument is intuitive and practical, which likely explains its high resonance: it offers a path forward rather than just a complaint.
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A significant fault line in the thread runs between commenters who see this as a genuine cross-cultural mix-up and those who believe ignorance is no longer a valid excuse. Oshino Hakkai has prominent multilingual signage explicitly prohibiting coin-throwing — a point several visitors to the site emphasized. Multiple commenters with firsthand experience said the signs are visible and clear. From this camp, the argument is not that tourists misunderstood Japan’s customs, but that they saw signs they could not pretend to miss, and chose to ignore them. The counterpoint — offered by at least one commenter who identified as having lived overseas — is that wishing wells and fountains are a deeply established practice in many countries, and the instinct to throw a coin into beautiful water is hard to suppress without an alternative channel. Both positions exist in the thread, but the “you had no excuse” view commanded more engagement.
The village’s proposed offertory box — a collection vessel styled like a traditional Shinto saisen-bako placed near (not in) the pools — drew a notably warm response from Japanese commenters, including several who had been otherwise critical. The concept resonates because it works with human behavior rather than against it: people want to make wishes, so give them a culturally appropriate place to do so, and redirect the proceeds to conservation. One commenter with a UK background pointed out that this is already standard practice at many fountains worldwide, where owners collect the coins as donations. Japanese respondents commenting on it approvingly tended to frame it as “obvious” and “sensible.” A few raised a practical concern — the collection box alone won’t work without also clearing the existing coins — but none opposed the idea outright.
A vocal minority pushed for harder consequences. Suggestions ranged from fines — one commenter suggested a 500,000 yen penalty for a 10-yen coin — to installing nets or barriers over the pools, to humorous proposals like putting up signs warning that throwing coins would bring a curse. A few commenters went further and called for restricting foreign tourist access to the site entirely, and one suggested excluding Chinese visitors specifically — a sentiment that drew no notable engagement and was isolated in the thread. These harder-line views existed at the edges of the discourse; the mainstream of the thread was more solution-oriented. Outright hostility toward tourists was a small fraction of the overall conversation.
