Printing a record of your goshuin: what goes on the paper, and what stays off

This article covers one thing: what goes on the paper when you print a record of your goshuin, what stays off it, and how to divide the printing up. Choosing a printer or a paper stock, and storing the goshuin book itself, are not covered here.

What has to be on the paper?

Four things — the visit date in both its Japanese era and the Western calendar, the name of the shrine or temple, which book and which page, and a photo of the goshuin — are enough to match the paper against the book in your hands. On a screen, search and sorting cover for whatever a record leaves out; paper has neither. The order of the rows, and the route back to the page itself, both have to be complete inside the sheet.

Before any of it reaches paper, how to hold your records as a list is a separate article. This one is about the move from that list onto paper: what to carry over, what to drop, and how to divide it.

Both forms of the date go on because paper cannot switch between them the way a screen can: with only one of the two, you convert in your head every time you read a row. The era date is the faster one when you are checking against the goshuin in front of you; the Western date is the faster one when you are matching a row against anything else you kept. Why the date on a goshuin is written in a Japanese era, and how the order breaks at a change of era, are in holding both the era date and the Western date in a record.

How big should the photos be?

Paper for telling entries apart can have small photos; paper for looking at them wants one goshuin to a page. Six entries on an A4 sheet, two columns by three rows, leaves each photo about 7 cm tall once you allow the lines for the date and the name. That is enough to tell which goshuin is which from the brushed name and date, and too small for the movement of the brush or the detail in the red seal.

One to a page means 40 sheets for a book of 40 goshuin. Six to a sheet brings the same book down to seven. Print large for the copy you hand to family or slip into an album, and small for the copy you keep beside the book, and the number of sheets stays manageable.

One set per book, or one set per year?

Divide by book when the paper will lie open beside the goshuin book; divide by year when you are looking back over a year or handing that year to family. Each has a weak side, so here they are next to each other.

Whichever you choose, print the units that have stopped moving. A finished book or a year already past can still grow if you are partway through entering a backlog of photos, so start with the ones whose records are all in. Print a book you are still filling, or the year you are in, and the paper goes out of date at your next visit.

When you divide by book, write that book's first and last visit date on its first sheet. However many sets one year of visits is spread across, "which book holds spring 2023" is then answered by the first sheet of each set.

When you divide by year, keep the book and page columns anyway. They are the only route from a year's paper back to the page in the goshuin book.

Which means that either way, "which book, which page" has to be in the record itself before anything is printed. A photo album that holds nothing but the order you shot in cannot print that column.

What should stay off the paper?

Three things: the notes you wrote for yourself, anything that shows where you live, and a long run of nearby shrines and temples. Once a sheet has left your hands you no longer choose who sees it, and you cannot go back and erase one part of it.

• Notes you wrote for yourself. Who you went with, how you were feeling — the things written on the assumption that they would stay on a screen.
• Anything that shows where you live. A location column in a table you built yourself, or the addressed post caught in the background of a photo taken at home.
• A long run of nearby shrines and temples. Dozens of visits to the same few places map out the area you live in, with no address written anywhere.

How far to strip a record back for each person you show it to, and how to check the capture location left inside a photo is a separate article, about handing a record to anyone at all rather than about paper in particular.

Is it all right to print the goshuin photos themselves?

Printing for yourself and your family to look at is one thing; publishing that paper or handing it around is another, and the two are worth keeping apart. How a shrine or temple sees photographs of its goshuin, and showing them to other people, differs from place to place, and some ask visitors not to post the images at all. Even with a sheet printed to look at at home, displaying it, handing it to a crowd, or using it in another printed piece is something to check against what that shrine or temple asks first — and where you cannot find out, erring on the side of not doing it is the safe answer. How to check what each shrine or temple says about photographing and posting is a separate article again.

What happens to the paper when you correct a record afterwards?

The paper is a copy of the day it was printed, so the moment you correct a record the paper becomes the older of the two. Write an edition number and the date it was made in a corner every time you print, and however many copies are lying around, you can tell which one is current.

It can be short. "Book 2 · edition 2 · made 2026-09-17" carries all three facts: which set, which printing, and when it was made. When a new edition comes off the printer, either dispose of the old one or write "superseded" on its cover sheet and keep it apart.

Three corrections come up more often than any others: a visit date misread from the era date, the same shrine or temple written two different ways, and pages put back in a different order. When you correct a sheet by hand, make the same correction in the record. Correct the paper alone and the old mistake comes back with the next printing. The record is always the original, and the paper is its copy.

In the app we make

In “Goshuin Ledger”, the iOS app we make, the PDF export that comes with the one-time Ledger Full purchase is what you print from. The PDF is one file per book, and any goshuin not yet in a book go into a file of their own.

One PDF holds:

• The name of the book, and a heading for each page number (for the goshuin that are in the book)
• The photo of each goshuin (a copy scaled down to about 800px on the long edge as it is exported)
• The visit date in its Japanese era and in the Western calendar
• The name of the shrine or temple
• Your note
• The date the PDF was made, at the end

The reading of the shrine or temple name, and the pin you dropped on the map, are not in it. Your notes, on the other hand, are. There is no setting that leaves the notes out of an export, so read through them before the paper goes to family. The date it was made is in the PDF, but an edition number is not, so add that by hand on the printed sheet if you want one. And because each photo is a copy about 800px on the long edge, blowing it up large on paper comes out coarse.

There is no export that divides by year. For paper by year, the route is the CSV export — also part of Ledger Full — opened in a spreadsheet and filtered on the Western visit-date column before you print. The CSV lines up the name of the shrine or temple, the visit date in both forms, the book and page, your note and more, one row per goshuin, but it carries no photos, so paper made this way is a list without them. What goes into the PDF, the CSV and the backup sets out every column.

The first book needs no purchase and takes as many entries as you like, but PDF and CSV export belong to Ledger Full. The App Store shows the price. What the purchase covers is set out on the home page. The backup you keep against a phone change (an encrypted file with a passphrase) needs no purchase either, but it is not made to be read, so it is no use for printing.