Did I already receive a goshuin here? Checking your record on a revisit

This article covers one thing only: using your own record to check, when you visit a shrine or temple again, whether you received a goshuin there before. What a given place grants, when its office is open, and how to ask for a goshuin are not covered here.

How do you check whether you already received a goshuin at a place you are revisiting?

Pull the record up by the name of the shrine or temple, or by its reading, and the visit date, book and page on what comes back answer it without your opening the paper book. Checking with the paper books alone means turning them a page at a time, and three books means three books’ worth.

While you have been to ten places you can hold it in your head. At thirty, at fifty, you can still get as far as “I think I have been here before”, but not to “did I receive a goshuin that time” or “which book is it in”.

For the check itself the record needs only the name and reading, the visit date, and the book and page. If you have no record at all yet, working the visit dates and books up out of a backlog of photos is where to start.

The three things that go missing on a revisit

What catches you out on a revisit is whether you received one before, whether you hold another goshuin from the same place, and which page of which book it is on. Each of the three asks for slightly different fields.

You cannot remember whether you received one

The name of the place may have stayed with you, but the difference between a visit where you only paid your respects and a visit where you received a goshuin rarely does. One record with a visit date on it answers both that you received one and when. A record whose visit date is still blank cannot answer the “when”, so fill it in first — narrowing the visit date down from the capture date and the photos on either side goes through how.

You cannot remember whether you hold another goshuin from the same place

Some places have several halls or shrines within the grounds, each granting a goshuin of its own. Whether you received one of them some years ago or both of them is not something the name of the place can tell you. Record one entry per goshuin, and write the name of the hall, or whatever else separates them, on the first line of the note; then you can tell them apart when that place’s records are lined up together.

You cannot remember which page of which book it is on

Knowing you received one does not get you far when you want to look at the original and cannot find where it sits in the book — you end up turning pages anyway. With the book and page recorded, there is exactly one place to open. Why the book is the unit to hold them in is in “keeping books and pages straight as your books multiply”.

For pre-written sheets you keep without pasting them in, write where they are stored in the note instead of a book and page. A folder name or a box number fixes the place to open just as a book and page do. What to do with a stack of them still in a bundle is in “identifying loose pre-written sheets and putting them in order”.

What does a record need to answer this on the spot?

Three things: it can be pulled up by name and reading, one place’s records line up in visit-date order, and the book and page are on it. A paper notebook, a spreadsheet or an app will all do the job once those three are there. Where to keep the list — notebook, spreadsheet, app or paper is compared in another article.

• It can be pulled up by name and reading. The name on a goshuin is brush-written, and often you cannot recall the characters exactly. With the reading recorded, you can search in kana. Writing the same place sometimes one way and sometimes another stops its records coming out together, so keep one place to one spelling.
• One place’s records line up in visit-date order. If the results come back in the order you entered them, you have to hunt for which one was last time. Newest visit date first, and the top row is last time.
• The book and page are on it. Do not let the record be the end of the trail; keep a way back to the spot in the paper book.

Do the checking before you enter the grounds, or after you leave, rather than standing at the office working a phone for any length of time. A record you can pull up from a few characters of the name or the reading is quick enough for that.

What if the same name stands in several places?

Pulling the name up on its own mixes in the record of a place of the same name somewhere else, so note the city or town to tell them apart. What you took for “I received one here before” turns out to have been a place of the same name on a trip.

Shrines and temples sharing a name stand all over the country, and the same characters are read differently from one region to another. When a place near home and a place you visited while travelling have the same name, the list alone will not tell you which record belongs to which.

Add two things to the record to separate them.

1. Record the reading. Where the characters match but the reading does not, the reading pulls them apart. Readings often match too, though, so this alone is not enough.
2. Add one word for the city or town. In a table, add a column for it. In a tool where you cannot add a column, put it after the name in brackets — “(such-and-such City)”. The point is to put it where it shows beside the name in the list of results.

A record with the city and the visit date side by side also becomes, over a run of visits near home, something that hints at the area you live in. Which records to leave out before showing them to anyone is in another article.

What if the goshuin on a revisit differs from last time?

When you receive a goshuin that differs from last time, leave the earlier record as it is and keep the new one as a separate entry with that day’s visit date. With the two side by side, comparing the photos is enough to tell you what changed and when.

A goshuin received on a revisit is not necessarily the same as before. The person writing may have changed, the characters written or the seals impressed may differ, something written directly in the book last time may come as a pre-written sheet. Why it changed is not for a visitor to decide, and how it is handled differs from place to place.

Overwrite the earlier record and merge the two into one, and “since when has it been different” is gone. Even when the goshuin is the same as last time, keeping one entry per visit lets you work out later how many years there were between them.

In the app I am building

In “Goshuin Ledger”, the app I am building, searching by the name of the shrine or temple or by its reading lines up the goshuin from places whose name contains what you typed, newest visit date first, with which book and which page on every row. The check before a revisit takes a few characters of the name or the reading.

• You can search by the name, the reading, your note, the visit date in its Japanese era (“Reiwa 3”, for instance), and the type; hiragana and katakana match each other, as do full-width and half-width characters.
• Each row of the results shows the name, the Japanese-era visit date, the book’s name and the page, and the first line of the note. Keep the name of a hall short on that first line and you can tell records apart in the list itself.
• One shrine or temple can hold several goshuin, each with its own visit date. There is no limit on the number of entries.
• As you type a name, shrines and temples you saved earlier are suggested, so you do not end up saving the same place again under a different spelling.
• Every record is on the device and the search uses no network, so it works where the signal is weak. What “saved on the device” and “sends nothing” each mean, and how to check them is written out separately.

There are things it does not do. A row of results does not show where the place is, so to tell places of the same name apart you add the city to the name as above. It holds nothing about what a given place grants or when its office is open. There is no feature for finding shrines and temples near where you are now, and it asks for no location permission. It cannot sync records with a family member’s phone either.

Your first book needs no purchase and records as many entries as you like. If you own two or more goshuin books, books from the second on come with the one-time “Ledger Full”. What the purchase covers is set out on the home page, and the App Store shows the current price.

The reading and the city, incidentally, are both fields you can look up and add after the record exists. Which fields can be added later and which can only be kept on the day is another article’s subject.