At first I thought these pieces of paper where prayer requests that people have tied on the strings inside of this shrine area. However, I learned that instead they are wishes. People insert about $1USD into a vending machine on the other side of the building and it prints out a fortune-like wish on paper for them. Then if the wish is bad, you're supposed to tie it to the strings as shown in the picture. In doing this, the bad wish hopefully won't come true.