Keeping a list of your goshuin: the rows and columns that let you look one up later

This article covers one thing only: turning the goshuin you have collected into a list you can look things up in afterwards. It does not go into what any particular shrine or temple grants, or how to choose a book. If all you have so far is a pile of photographs and no record at all, work through the three stages from photographs to fixed visit dates, books and pages first, and everything here applies as written.

What do you decide first?

Three things, in this order: what one row stands for, which columns you keep, and where the list lives. Change what a row stands for later and you rebuild every row; some columns can be added afterwards and some cannot; and you cannot compare the places to keep a list until its rows and columns are settled.

Start at the other end — open a spreadsheet or an app and begin typing into whichever boxes it offers — and the corrections arrive after the list is large: the column you turn out to need, the row that was really two goshuin. At thirty entries you fix it. At three hundred you stop wanting to.

What does a list let you look up?

A paper book can only be turned page by page. A list lets you reach a goshuin from whichever end you happen to remember: the visit date, the name of the shrine or temple, or the book it is in. With one book, turning pages is enough. Past three books and a hundred entries, turning pages stops keeping up.

A list answers questions like these at once.

• Every visit to one place, together. For a shrine or temple you have been to several times: when you went, and which goshuin you received each time.
• Where you went in a given season. Which places that trip three springs ago covered, pulled up by visit date.
• Which book holds which goshuin. The one book, and the page in it, without taking every book down off the shelf.
• What period each book covers. Even for a spell when you were filling two books at once, the first and last visit date in each one tells them apart.

None of that is new information. All of it is already written in the books. A list creates nothing — it is an index that rearranges what is scattered across the pages into a form you can query. Holding that in mind keeps your decisions about what to include steady.

Different occasions need different columns

Four occasions — before a repeat visit, finding which book something is in, showing the list to someone, and moving to a new phone — use overlapping but not identical columns. Work out which of them you will be doing most often and the order of priority among the columns settles itself.

Before a repeat visit, being able to search on the name or its reading is enough; how to check your records for whether you have received one before is a separate article.

Finding which book is where the book and page columns do the work. If a name or a date gets you to the page you should open, the job is done. Writing a running number inside the cover of each book makes the list and the paper correspond one to one. Why the book is worth keeping as a unit of its own is worth reading alongside this.

Showing family or friends is about removing rather than adding. A note often carries the name of whoever you were with and what was going on that day, and if you record the place on a map, that is a record of your movements. Which columns to take out before you show the list to someone goes through it occasion by occasion.

Changing phones or tools punishes a partial export: whatever columns you left behind, you refill by hand. The trap is that an export meant to be read as a list and a backup meant to be carried to another device are usually two different things. Having the records in table form does not mean the same tool on the new phone can read them back in. What to check before you move keeps a column from going missing halfway across.

One row is one goshuin

A row is not one shrine or temple, and not one visit. It is one goshuin. Kept one to a row, regrouping by place or by date is only a sort. Splitting a row you wrote as a summary is hand work, all of it.

Make the row a place and a shrine you visited five times collapses into a single line, taking the date of the second visit with it. Make the row a visit and, when one place gave you two different goshuin on one day, you have no way to say which of them went into which book on which page.

Decide before you start how many pages a goshuin written across a spread counts as. Start without deciding and, from some point on, the page numbers in the list drift away from the ones in the book. How to count spreads, and several goshuin from one place is settled in the second half of the photo-sorting steps. Use the same count in the list.

Which columns? The ones to fill first, and the ones that can wait

Start from eight columns, which between them cover every occasion above: visit date (Western calendar), visit date (Japanese era), name of the shrine or temple, reading, book, page, photo, note. Add up the columns the four occasions in the table use and, setting aside the conditional ones like location and the place on a map, they come to these eight. Eight is not a target to fill in from day one. It is a line drawn so that a field you write on some days and not others never becomes a column.

The two to fill in for every entry first are the visit date and the name, both of which get harder to recall the longer they wait. The rest can be added once the occasion that uses them arrives. Which fields to record, whatever tool you use sorts them one by one into the ones you can add later and the ones you cannot.

Keeping the visit date in two columns, Western and Japanese era, has a reason. Count year one as 1, ignore the era name, and sort ascending on the year number alone: you get Reiwa 1, Reiwa 2, Heisei 31, which leaves the oldest record of the three at the bottom. Sort the era dates as text instead and it breaks in a different way, with year 10 landing before year 9; what that looks like when you sort Japanese-era dates in a spreadsheet lays the rows out. Divide the work — sort on the Western column, read the era column when you are holding a goshuin against the list — and neither breaks. The days on which one era gives way to the next are tabulated in how to hold Japanese-era and Western dates in a record.

Anything you want beyond the eight goes into the note rather than into a column, unless every row will carry a value for it. A column full of blanks is a column you stop trusting when you read the list back. Values that do land in every row are fine as columns: a serial number in a spreadsheet you build yourself, how certain the visit date is, or the location that tells two identically named places apart. The type column you need when goshuin and gojoin share one list belongs on that side too.

Filling those columns for several hundred entries, and keeping every row tied to its photograph, is the most laborious part of the whole business. Where that labour lands depends on where you keep the list.

Where do you keep the list?

A notebook, a spreadsheet, a recording app and print each change four things: how you find the row you want, what you can sort on, how you get from a row to the photograph, and how a copy leaves your hands for someone else's. Choosing a method from how many photographs and how many books you have covers how to keep records from here on. This section compares only what a finished list lets you do in each place.

Notebook

A list in a notebook reads the moment you open it, and needs neither power nor knowing how to work anything. Up to a few dozen entries, read only by you, that is enough. Sorting is where it is weak: the rows cannot move from the order you wrote them, so reviewing by visit date or by place means following them with your eye. An older goshuin you catalogue later cannot be slipped into the middle either, so the order you wrote in drifts steadily away from the order you visited in.

Spreadsheet

For latitude in sorting and filtering, nothing else here comes close. By visit date, by name, by book and page — switch as often as the question changes. Photographs are where it stumbles: the row and the image live in separate places, and you go looking for the image with a file name or a number written in the row. How to tie a photograph to its row, and how to get back to page order after sorting is covered at length in the article given over to spreadsheets.

A recording app

Photograph and record are one item, so opening a record shows the photograph with it, and your phone is all you need. In exchange, the columns are the ones the app decided on, and the orderings are whichever ones it offers. What matters when you want the list outside the app is whether the records come out in list form at all. With no export, moving them to a spreadsheet or to paper means retyping one record at a time. Exports come in two kinds — a PDF or a CSV to be read, and a backup to be carried to another device — and what each file holds and what it cannot be used for is sorted out separately.

Printed on paper

If someone other than you is going to read it, paper carries best. No device, no app, and with the photographs printed alongside, the reader looks at the goshuin while reading about it. The cost is that a printed list begins going out of date the moment it leaves the printer. What holds up is not treating the paper as the master copy but as a copy run off from the list. Whether to print by book or by year, and what to leave off the paper is worth settling before you print.

Three promises that keep a list usable

Write each name one way, distinguish “unknown” from “not entered yet”, and name one master copy. Keep those three and the list survives several hundred entries.

1. Write each name one way. Write the same place in kanji here, in kana there and by its common nickname somewhere else, and no amount of sorting will bring the three together. Once you have chosen the form, the other names go in the reading column or the note.
2. Distinguish “unknown” from “not entered yet”. Leave a row blank because you looked and could not establish the visit date, and it is indistinguishable from a row you have not touched yet — so you research the same row again and again. Write in the note that you looked and could not tell.
3. Name one master copy. Keep the same records in a spreadsheet and an app and a notebook and you lose track of which is the newest. Add to the master only, and treat everything else as a copy made from it.

How this works in the app I make

Goshuin Ledger, the app I make, is a recording app built on books and pages: inside a book the order is page order, and search results come back with the newest visit date first. It is the recording-app row of the table above, so here is what it does and does not do when you use it as a list.

What it does:

• Pick several photos from your photo library at once and they line up in Imported photos, each with its capture date standing in as the visit date. Fix the visit dates, then add them to a book and its pages.
• Visit dates can be entered in a Japanese era — Reiwa, Heisei, Showa, Taisho, Meiji. The record holds an actual date underneath, so the order by visit date holds across a change of era.
• Goshuin are held one at a time, so one shrine or temple can hold as many as you like, each with its own visit date.
• You can search by the name of the shrine or temple, its reading, your note, the Japanese-era visit date, or the type, and every result shows which book and which page. The check before a repeat visit is one search on the name.
• Export CSV and you get one goshuin per row, with the name, the visit date in both the Japanese era and the Western calendar, the book and page, your note and more — ready to sort and filter in a spreadsheet.
• Export PDF and you get one file per book, with the photograph of each goshuin and its visit date and name laid out in page order.

What goes into the CSV and what goes into the PDF is set out in the differences between a PDF, a CSV and a backup, and what to put on the paper and how to arrange it in putting a printed list together.

What it does not do, said up front:

• You cannot add columns of your own. Anything more you want to write goes in the note.
• The CSV does not hold the photographs themselves. To read records with their photographs, use the PDF.
• A pin you dropped on the map appears in neither the CSV nor the PDF; your notes appear in both. There is no setting that leaves only the notes out of an export, so read your notes back before you hand a file to anyone.
• The CSV and the PDF are exports meant to be read, and neither can be imported back into the app. A phone change uses the encrypted ZIP with a passphrase instead.
• It does not sync between devices, so you and a family member cannot edit one list at the same time.

The first book takes as many entries as you like without a purchase, and the encrypted ZIP export needs no purchase either. A second book and beyond, “Add all to book” for imported photos, and PDF / CSV export come with the one-time Ledger Full. The App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is set out in the pricing section. It runs on iPhone with iOS 16.4 or later.

A list is for looking things up, not for counting them

The point of a list is not to confirm how many goshuin or how many books you have. It is to reach what you received, and where, on a particular day, without turning a page. The totals are only something you notice on the way.

You do not have to fill every column from the start. With the visit date and the name present for every entry, the list already does the check you need before a repeat visit. Add the book and page columns and it tells you which page to open. The rest can wait for the occasion that asks for them.