Over 25,000 candles have been placed in public shrines (and now private shrines) on nshrine.com. Though it was a public candle in a well-traffic shrine, I don’t feel quite okay about linking directly to it here, as it was a candle of mourning.
So I have mixed feelings about the milestone. Though if you browse a few shrines, you’ll see that there are many playful and even goofy shrines, most shrines and candles are for people to mark or share the sorrows and losses they’ve experienced. So I can’t really jump up and down–“Yay! Another moment of mourning!”–I can be pleased that there’s one more moment where someone expressed something probably best not left unexpressed.
