Behind on recording your goshuin: where to start again
Clearing a backlog of goshuin oldest-first is where most people stall, because the end never comes into view. Start instead with the most recent visit, and with the one goshuin book you are using now. Once those two are done you are caught up to today, and working backwards into the older books from there is much easier to keep going. Hold yourself to two fields — the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple — and get those, and only those, for every entry first.
The key points of this article
- Work the most recent visit and the book you are using now, not the oldest entries first
- Four things stall a record: you cannot write it on the spot, the date stops being obvious later, loose sheets pile up unpasted, and you never decided how much to write
- The order to clear it in is photographs, then visit dates, then books and pages
- At the start, get two things for every entry and no more: the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple
- Photograph each goshuin on the day of the visit and the capture date stands in as your copy of the visit date
This article is part of “Goshuin photos piled up on your phone: how to organise them into a record afterwards”.
This article covers one thing only: how to rebuild a goshuin record once it has fallen behind. Whether to carry on collecting goshuin, and which tool to keep the record in, are not in scope.
I let the record pile up. Where do I start?
Do not start at the oldest entry; record the most recent visit first. Then clear the one goshuin book you are using now, and nothing else. Finish those two and you are, once, caught up to today — and working back into the older books from that position is much easier to sustain.
Starting a backlog at the oldest end gives you no end to see. Entering the third of a hundred, the remaining ninety-seven stay in view the whole time. It is a way of working in which the feeling of having cleared something never arrives until the very last entry, which is exactly why people stop in the middle.
Once the book you are using is done, everything from its first page to today is something you can look back through, and every visit from here on is just added to the end of it.
Why it stops: the four places a record breaks down
A record stops for one of four reasons: you cannot write it on the spot, the date stops being obvious later, loose sheets pile up unpasted, or you never decided how much to write. Which one it is decides where you intervene.
You cannot write it on the spot. Just after the visit you are still in the afterglow of having had the goshuin written for you. Standing in front of the office, opening your phone and typing is not something you feel like doing. That is not laziness; it is the reasonable way to feel. Settle it the other way round: on the day, take the photograph and nothing else, and leave the entering for another day.
The date stops being obvious later. Open the photographs a few months on and the date on the goshuin is in a Japanese era, the capture date of the photograph is in the Western calendar, and the capture date may not be the day you visited at all. Every single check stops your hands, so settle the dates in one pass after the photographs are gathered, rather than in the middle of entering each record. How to trace a visit date from the capture date and the photographs either side of it, for when the date on the goshuin cannot be read, is a separate article.
Pasting is a chore, so loose sheets pile up. Pasting asks for a lot of small decisions and cannot be undone. So the sheets sit in a bundle, and the record sits with them. Leave whether to paste for later, and let the record go ahead from the photographs.
You never decided how much to write. You write the first entry in loving detail, then cannot hold that standard from the second one on. Or you never settle what belongs in it and close the screen without entering anything. Narrow the fields you fill at the start to two, and this stops being where you stall.
The order to clear the backlog in
Gather the photographs, settle the visit dates, then order them into books and pages — in that order. Swap two of those around and you do the same work twice.
1. Gather the photographs. Bring every photo you took of a goshuin into one place. No judgement at this stage: start asking "should this one go in?" and you stop moving.
2. Settle the visit dates. Work through the photographs you gathered and decide each visit date. It is usually written on the goshuin itself, so look there first. Where you cannot read it, narrow it down from the capture date of the photograph.
3. Order them into books and pages. Only once the dates are settled. The other way round, every date you correct breaks the order again.
How to work each of the three stages, and roughly how long each one takes, is in organising a backlog of goshuin photographs on your phone into a record. The mechanics of importing a pile of photographs in one go are in is there an app that can register goshuin photographs in bulk?.
Do not try to fill it in perfectly from the start
At the start, get two things for every entry and no more: the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple. The photographs are already in your hands, and a note or an impression can be added whenever you feel like writing one.
The fields divide into the ones that can wait and the ones that stop being recoverable later.
| Can wait | Stops being recoverable |
|---|---|
| Your note, your impressions | The visit date |
| The reading of the name, where the place stands | The name of the shrine or temple |
The visit date and the name sit in the right-hand column because a cursive hand can be unreadable even when it is there on the paper, and because some loose sheets carry no date at all. For those goshuin the only clues are your memory and the capture date of a photograph, and memory thins out with every year.
Try to write the first entry perfectly and you tend to run out of breath around the tenth. The effort of entering grows with the number of fields. Say a field takes ten seconds: ten fields is a hundred seconds an entry, two fields is twenty. Leaving aside the time spent looking at the goshuin to check it, the typing alone differs by a factor of five.
If restarting is the moment you want to narrow the fields themselves, a way of sorting fields by whether they can be added later is a separate article. It splits the fields worth having from the start from the ones that can all go into a single note.
What to do on the day, so it does not pile up again
Make one habit and no more: on the day of the visit, take one photograph of the goshuin. Entering it can wait. The single exception is a goshuin whose brushwork is too cursive for you to read the name — for those, note the name in a word or two the same day. Photograph it the same day and the capture date stands in as your copy of the visit date.
Having no photograph and having only a photograph are not remotely the same amount of work later. With the photograph you can enter the record while reading the name and the date off it, without getting the book out at all.
The same goes for a loose sheet: photograph it on the day you receive it and, however long the pasting is put off, the clue to the visit date survives. What to do with a bundle of sheets you already have is in for anyone holding a stack of goshuin sheets still not pasted in.
Keeping the record from becoming the point
A record is a means of retracing a visit afterwards. Many people receive a goshuin as proof that they visited, and filling in a record is not the point of that. Nor is it something to compete over — not the number you have gathered, and not how fully the record is filled in.
If recording starts to hurt, I think it is fine to put it down for a while. The photographs are not going anywhere. As long as the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple are down, next year is soon enough to start again.
And one thing worth watching: taking the photograph, and keeping the record, should never take precedence over the visit itself. What to bear in mind when photographing a goshuin is in how far it is all right to go when photographing a goshuin.
Frequently asked questions
- Should I just give up on the ones from years ago?
- There is no need to. A goshuin whose paper shows the name of the shrine or temple and the date legibly can be turned into a record however many years pass, so it can wait. What is worth picking up first is the opposite case — brushwork too cursive to read, or a loose sheet with no date on it — where the only clues you have are your memory and the day a photograph was taken.
- How do I record a goshuin I never photographed?
- Photograph the page in the book now and you can work from that, but the capture date of a photograph taken today is not the visit date. Take the visit date from the date written on the goshuin itself. Where there is no date and the goshuin was brushed straight into the book, the dates on the pages before and after it give you a range to narrow it to. Write in your note that the date is an estimate, and you will be able to tell it apart from a certain one later.
- I can feel myself stalling again part-way through.
- Finish one book all the way through — photographs, then visit dates, then books and pages — before you move to the next. Go across instead, gathering every book's photographs and then checking every book's dates, and the day you stop you have no way of seeing how far you got. Finish a book at a time and restarting is just opening the book you have not finished.
- The backlog spans several books and I cannot tell which book a photograph belongs to.
- The photographs alone cannot settle it, so keep the books in front of you and match against them. Decide to clear one book at a time, hold that book open, and look through the photographs for the ones that belong to it — going in that one direction keeps the matching one-way. Photographs that match none of the books get set aside as loose sheets you never pasted in, and reviewed together at the end.