How to read the Japanese era date written on your goshuin

This article covers one thing: reading the date written on a goshuin and turning it into a Western date. How to ask for a goshuin, and what to do at the shrine or temple, are not covered here.

Where is the date on the page?

Look down the left-hand side of the writing. The Japan National Tourism Organization describes the layout the same way: the name of the shrine or temple is written across the red seals, the date of the visit on the left, and in the upper right corner the word 奉拝 (hōhai), "to worship". Temples may write something else in that corner, and the exact arrangement is the calligrapher's.

The writing runs top to bottom, and where there is more than one column, the columns run right to left. A date is normally a single column, read downwards in the order era, year, month, day. The last character in the column is 日, "day".

So one column, 令和六年八月十日, comes apart like this:

That column is August 10, 2024. The next three sections take one step each.

Which era is it? There are five to recognise

The date opens with the era name, one or two characters long. Five eras cover every goshuin written since 1868, and each began on a fixed day.

If you travelled in the last few years, the era is 令和 and nothing else, and you can skip straight to the year. The four older names turn up in a book you inherited or bought second hand, or on a loose sheet tucked into one.

Reiwa and Heisei share no character, which is useful when the brush is loose: one legible character is enough. 令 or 和 means Reiwa; 平 or 成 means Heisei. The three older names are easier still, because a book that has any of them in it is old enough that the rest of its pages will tell you the same story.

The number after the era is not a Western year

Era years restart at 1. 六年 is the sixth year of Reiwa — not 2006, and not 1906. Add a fixed number to the era year and you have the Western year.

元年 is year 1. The first year of an era is normally written 元年 (gannen) rather than 一年, so 令和元年 is 2019 and 平成元年 is 1989. The character 元 means a beginning, not a numeral, and nothing is missing from the date.

Kanji numerals: ten characters, then a rule

The numbers are written as words, not digits. Ten characters carry almost every date you will meet:

一 1, 二 2, 三 3, 四 4, 五 5, 六 6, 七 7, 八 8, 九 9, 十 10.

Above ten, the numbers are built around 十:

• A unit after 十 adds to it: 十一 is 11, 十五 is 15, 十九 is 19.
• A unit before 十 multiplies it: 二十 is 20, 三十 is 30.
• Both together: 二十日 is the 20th day, 三十一日 is the 31st day.

Months are plain numbers with 月 after them, so 一月 is January and 十二月 is December. There are no month names to learn, and the day ends in 日.

Two worked examples

令和六年八月十日 → Reiwa, year 6 → 2018 + 6 = 2024 → August 10, 2024.

平成三十一年四月二十日 → Heisei, year 31 → 1988 + 31 = 2019 → April 20, 2019. The era name says Heisei and the Western year says 2019, and both are right, which is exactly the case the next section is about.

The two years that catch everyone

An era changes in the middle of a calendar year, so 2019 and 1989 each carry two era names.

• 2019: up to April 30 it is Heisei 31; from May 1 it is Reiwa 1, written 令和元年.
• 1989: up to January 7 it is Showa 64; from January 8 it is Heisei 1.

Read the month before you decide that a date is wrong. A page dated 平成三十一年四月 and a page dated 令和元年五月 are about five weeks apart, not thirty years.

The same boundary quietly breaks the order of your records. Three visits written 平成三十一年三月, 令和元年六月 and 令和二年一月 are in that order on the page — but sorted on the era year alone, 1 and 2 come before 31 and the oldest visit lands last. Convert each date and sort on the Western one.

When the brush defeats you

Cursive strokes, a worn page, or a stamp overlapping the date will all stop you reading a character. Work inwards from what you already know, in this order.

1. Your own trip. The year is settled by when you travelled, so you only have a month and a day left to find.
2. The photo of the page. If you photographed the page on the day, its capture date is your day. If you photographed the whole book after you got home, it is not.
3. The pages either side. A goshuin book fills in order, so a page between two dates you can read falls between those dates.
4. The seals and the name. Naming the place first often gives you the date, because you can match it to the day you were there. Reading the seals is its own job, and we wrote it up separately in how to work out which shrine or temple a goshuin came from.

One thing to sort out before you start: if your book ran out partway through the trip and you carried on in a second one, keep the two books apart while you read. Pages from the two of them interleave by date, and telling them apart afterwards is far harder than handling a goshuincho that fills up mid-trip while you still remember the day it happened.

Some goshuin carry no date

Whether the visit date is written at all is left to each shrine or temple, and we cannot tell you what any particular place does. A sheet prepared in advance and handed over on a busy day (kakioki) may have the date filled in, or a blank where it would go. Neither is an oversight.

For a page with no date, the date belongs in your own notes. A goshuin records that you were there, which is also why the date you attach to it should be the day of the visit rather than the day you photographed the page — a distinction we go into in why a goshuin is not quite a souvenir.

Keep both dates, and sort on one of them

Once you have read a page, write down both forms: the Japanese era date as it stands on the paper, and the Western date you converted it to.

• The era date is what you compare against the page when you go back to it. Copying it as written means you never have to re-read the brushwork.
• The Western date is what you sort on, and what matches your photos, your flights and everything else you kept from the trip.

If you can only keep one, keep the Western date. The order of your own visits is worth more than the convenience of matching the page at a glance.

In the app we make

Goshuin Ledger, the iPhone app we make, takes a visit date with its era — Reiwa, Heisei, Showa, Taisho or Meiji — and orders your records by the day you visited rather than the day you entered them. You import the photos you took of the pages, correct each visit date, then add them to a book and its pages.

The first book needs no purchase and takes as many records as you like. Making a second book and beyond comes with the one-time Ledger Full purchase; what a purchase adds is set out in the pricing section, and the App Store shows the current price.

There are things it will not do. It does not sync between devices, so your records stay on the phone you use. Page numbers follow the order in which you add photos to a book, so when the paper runs in a different order, you move the rows up or down.