Choosing what to record for each goshuin: what you can add later, and what you cannot

This article covers only how to decide which fields your goshuin records carry. Reading the writing on a goshuin, and comparing the tools you might keep the records in, are each covered elsewhere.

What should a goshuin record actually hold?

Settle the fields you cannot add later, leave the ones you can for later, and let one note carry the ones you can live without. In practice: start with four — the visit date, the name of the shrine or temple, a photo, and a note — and make it six, with book and page, if you already own two or more goshuin books. The name can be added later when the page can be read, but on a goshuin written in a hand you cannot make out it goes the moment your memory does, so it sits beside the visit date from the start.

What makes this decision hard is that the things you might want later are endless. Who you went with. The weather. The time of day. How long you queued. What you thought that afternoon. Every one of them is a pleasure to read back. But decide by what you might want and the list only grows. Decide by whether you can add it later and the number of fields you have to settle before you start drops sharply.

What a list of your records lets you look back on is in putting your records into a list you can look back on. This article is the part where you decide that list’s columns.

What happens when you sort the fields into three groups?

Sort them into only-on-the-day, look-it-up-later and live-without, and the only group you have to settle before you start is the first one. Here are the fields people usually think of, sorted.

The visit date and the name each appear in two groups because whether you can add a field later comes down to whether the paper still holds it in a form you can read. And the live-without fields are, in truth, as hard to add later as the first group. The difference is that a list survives without them.

Why do the only-on-the-day fields have to be settled at the start?

Because adding one halfway through leaves everything before it unfillable, however long you look at the page. Start noting the visit date at record 50, for goshuin whose pages carry no date, and records 1 to 49 can only be guessed at from photos and memory; the ones you cannot guess stay empty. A field you can look up later costs you nothing by comparison — you go back and fill it in.

Pages carry no date in two situations: a pre-written sheet handed over with the date left blank, and a nokyocho, the book you carry around a pilgrimage circuit. A nokyocho is often written without the visit date in the brush writing at all, and from a second time round the circuit the seal may be pressed over the same page again (both are each circuit’s and each temple’s own practice). With those the page cannot give you a date, so the surest thing you have is the capture date of a photo taken that day. Recording which visit each of the layered seals belongs to is in the nokyocho article.

The capture date is not the visit date itself, which is worth watching. Photograph the pages once you are home from the trip, or photograph a stack of pre-written sheets some later evening, and the capture date runs behind the visit. Narrowing the visit date down from the capture date and the photos either side is a separate article.

The name of the shrine or temple can go the same way. Where the brush writing is too cursive to read, neither the page nor a photo of it will give you the name, and what you are left with is mostly your memory of being there. Memory thins year by year, so a name you could not read is the one to write down the same day.

Which leaves a short conclusion. All you have to do on the day of a visit is take one photo of the goshuin and write down any name you cannot read. The photo does not have to be taken on the grounds; take it at your own table that evening and its capture date stands in for the visit date. Entering it can wait — as long as the capture date exists, the visit date can be recovered from it.

When should you add the fields you can look up later?

When using the list makes you want them, which is soon enough. Add the reading of a name the first time you cannot recall the characters well enough to search for it; add the location the first time you want to see it on a map. None of it has to be in place before you start.

Two of them, though, are heavier than the rest.

• Enter a readable name early anyway. You can add it from the book however many years pass, but it is the key you search on, and until it is there the list cannot find anything. That is why it is one of the first four. A name too cursive to read belongs, as the table says, on the only-on-the-day side.
• Book and page get heavier with every book you own. While there is one book, opening it answers the question at once. At three or four, you are turning pages against every photo to match them up. Starting your second book is about the right moment to add the two fields. What to write on the paper side — a running number and the date you started, inside the cover or on the endpaper — is in keeping track of each book once you own several.

How do you keep the fields you can live without?

Not as fields of their own, but in one note. Give who you went with, the weather, how the day felt and written-or-pre-written a column each, and the days you write nothing line up as empty cells. A mostly empty column gets used for neither sorting nor searching, and costs entry time all the same.

One note lets you write on the days you feel like writing. A single line does it: “Pre-written sheet. With the family. Wet stone steps after the rain.” If your tool searches the note as well, the words you put there are what you find the record by later. Once you notice yourself writing the same thing across dozens of records, that is the moment to promote it to a field — not before.

The opposite case, something that always has a value in every single record, is fine as a field from the start. Whether an entry is a goshuin or a goshuinjo (a castle seal) is the example, when you keep both in one record. Whether to keep the paper books apart, and keeping the type as a field is a separate article.

Recording in a spreadsheet works the same way: keep the columns as few as you can and push the rest into the note column. Deciding the columns when you record in a spreadsheet covers the order to put them in and where it tends to jam.

One warning about the note. It is the field to check hardest before you show your records to anyone, because it is where the names of the people you went with and the events of the day end up. What to take out first is in what to check before you show your records to someone.

What is the smallest set of fields?

Four: the visit date, the name of the shrine or temple, a photo, and a note. What you add on top depends on the books in front of you.

Those four are there because each does a different job. The visit date is what you sort on, the name is what you search on, and the photo is what lets you check the other fields again later. With the photo, a readable name and a date written on the page can both be re-read without getting the book out. The note is where everything you did not make a field lands.

Which fields you keep as slots in your records is a different question from which fields you fill in for every goshuin already piled up. For a backlog, two are enough to complete everywhere: the visit date and the name. Restarting a backlog from those two fields and which column of the list to complete first are each covered separately.

What goes wrong if you keep too many fields?

Entry gets heavy, the record stalls, and the empty cells stop meaning anything. Settle on ten fields and you will fill all ten at first. Then the count grows, entry falls behind, and the fields you left until last start coming up empty.

The effort grows roughly in proportion to the number of fields. Say one field takes ten seconds: ten fields is 100 seconds a record, which is close to three hours over a hundred records. Four fields is 40 seconds a record, a little over an hour for the same hundred. The more of a backlog you are clearing in one sitting, the more directly that difference lands on you.

The other problem is that an empty cell stops saying which of three things it is: looked into and not found, not looked into yet, or does not apply. With empty cells everywhere you also lose track of how far you got. Restarting a stalled record from the visits you make next is a separate article.

If you do decide to cut fields back, the safe way is to leave the column in place and record where you stopped filling it. Delete the column and the values already in it go with it. Simply leaving it blank from some point on, with nothing written down, puts you back in the empty-cells-that-say-nothing state above.

In the app I make

The fields in Goshuin Ledger are fixed: you cannot add fields of your own. What it holds is the four of the minimum set above, plus book and page, the reading of the name, and location.

• Book: its cover, the shrine or temple you bought it at, and its start date. The first book needs no purchase and records as many goshuin as you like. From the second book on, it is the one-time Ledger Full.
• Page: numbers are assigned for you, and rows move up or down to reorder.
• Visit date: import photos in bulk and each capture date arrives as the starting value. You can fix it in a Japanese era (Reiwa, Heisei, Showa, Taisho, Meiji), and rows sort by the day you visited.
• The name and its reading: search by the name of a shrine or temple, its reading, your note, the Japanese-era visit date, or the type, and the results say which page of which book.
• Location: optional. Tap the map to drop a pin. The app never asks for location permission.
• Photo: saved scaled to about 2,048px on the long edge.
• Note: one per goshuin, and searched.

There is no dedicated field for who you went with or for the weather. If you want to keep those, they go in the note.

Export to CSV and the name, the visit date (in its Japanese era and in the Western calendar), book and page, the note and more line up one record per row, in a format that opens in Excel without garbled characters. Location appears in neither the CSV nor the PDF. The CSV columns and what the PDF carries is in the export article. PDF / CSV export comes with Ledger Full. What you can use without a purchase is set out in the pricing section, and the App Store shows the current price.