Shrine finances are unglamorous and worth knowing. Income comes from saisen, the coins thrown in the box; hatsuhoryō, the envelopes handed over for private rites like jichinsai, yakubarai and hatsumiyamairi; annual parish dues; and the very substantial sale of omamori, ofuda, omikuji and hamaya arrows, concentrated overwhelmingly at New Year. Urban shrines with land frequently rent it as coin parking, which is often the largest line. Religious corporations are tax-advantaged in Japan, which periodically becomes a political argument. The staffing arithmetic is the striking part: there are roughly twenty thousand certified priests for roughly eighty thousand shrines, so a typical rural priest administers several — sometimes a dozen — and a large proportion hold secular employment as teachers, civil servants or farmers alongside. A great many small shrines have no priest at all and are maintained entirely by the neighbourhood, with a priest visiting once a year for the festival if one can be found.