Planning a goshuin trip: the five things to decide before you fly

This article covers only what you decide before the trip. What a goshuin is, how to ask for one at the office, and how a book is put together are each covered separately, and linked where they come up.

What do you actually have to decide before you fly?

Five things: how many books you carry, where you buy the first one, how you will note the shrine or temple, how you will note the visit date, and that you have small coins on you. Everything else can be decided on the day, in front of the office, without slowing anyone down.

The first three are the ones travel guides cover. The fourth is the one almost nobody plans for, and it is the one that turns a book you were proud of into pages you cannot caption. If you have not met the object yet, what a goshuin is and what it is not is the place to start.

How many books do you carry?

One, unless you already know you will fill it. A goshuin book holds a fixed number of pages and each goshuin takes one, or two when it is written across a spread, so you can count roughly before you go: one page per place you expect to visit, with a few spare.

Carrying two part-used books costs you more than it saves. On the trip you have to remember which one you are filling; after the trip you have two objects whose pages interleave in time, and no page says which book it is in. If you run low, buy a second book in Japan and start it cleanly on the day you buy it — then the split in your record matches a date you can remember.

The mechanics of the object — the standard dimensions, the accordion fold, how many pages a book actually gives you, and how to tell how much is left — are in goshuincho sizes and how many pages a book gives you. Read that before you decide the number, because "how many pages" is not a single answer.

Where does the first book come from?

Buying it at the first shrine or temple you visit is the usual way, and the cover is usually particular to that place. Many offices offer their own book beside the desk where goshuin are written, which is why so many collections begin with the cover of the place the traveller went to first.

Two things to keep in mind. Whether a place sells books is that place's own decision — guides written for visitors say the same thing, which is to check in advance where you can and otherwise ask when you arrive. And books sold outside shrine and temple offices, in stationery shops or souvenir shops, are sometimes smaller than the standard size; a book that does not match what the writer expects can be turned away.

So have a fallback: a second place on your first day that you know offers books, or a stationery shop in the standard size. What you should not do is spend the first morning of the trip looking for a book instead of visiting anywhere.

Worship first, and ask at the office

A goshuin is received as proof that you visited, so the visit comes first. The Association of Shinto Shrines (Jinja Honcho) describes it exactly that way — as something received as proof of having visited and worshipped at the shrine — and says its origin is thought to lie in the receipt given for a hand-copied sutra offered at a shrine or temple. By its account the word "goshuin" itself only came into common use around the mid-1930s.

The Miyagi Prefecture Shrine Association's etiquette page puts the order plainly — a visit comes before the goshuin — and adds two practical notes: open the book to the page you would like written before you hand it over, and do not speak to the writer while they are writing. It also notes that hours for goshuin differ between shrines, and that a priest or member of staff is not always present.

What you say, and what you do if you share no language with the person at the desk, is in how to ask for a goshuin in Japanese. Reading it once before you fly is enough; the exchange is short.

The decision nobody plans: how will you know, later, which place a page came from?

Photograph each page on the day you receive it, and write the name of the shrine or temple in the same note. This is the one thing on the list that costs nothing on the trip and cannot be recovered afterwards.

Here is what goes wrong, and it is not a matter of being careless. A goshuin is brush-written, often in a cursive hand, and it names the shrine, the temple, or the deity or buddha enshrined there — not a place you would recognise from a map. Sitting at the office you know exactly where you are, so the page seems self-explanatory. Three weeks later, at home, with eleven pages in the book and four of them from one day in one city, the page is a beautiful object that will not tell you its own name.

Travel guides for visitors take you as far as the office and stop there. The one suggestion you tend to find for the after-trip problem is to write the name on a slip of paper and tuck it into the book — which tells you the problem is real and is being solved with paper.

Two habits, both of them seconds long:

• One photograph of each page, on the day. Your phone records the time it was taken, so the photograph carries the day even if you write nothing.
• The name, in text, the same day. A note in your phone, the caption on the photograph, wherever you will look. Romanised is fine — you are writing it for yourself, not for anyone else.

That is the whole preparation. Everything after it can be done at a table at home.

How will you record the visit date?

The date on the page is written in a Japanese era, so decide now whether you will keep it as written, convert it, or keep both. The date the writer enters is almost always in the reign era — Reiwa for anything written now — and not in the Western calendar your phone and your photographs use.

Keeping both is the safe answer. The era-dated form is what lets you match a record against the page in front of you; the Western form is what lets you sort. If you keep only one, keep the Western one: era years sort wrongly across a change of era, and the change from Heisei to Reiwa falls in the middle of 2019, so a collection that spans it is where the order breaks. What you need before the trip is not the conversion table, only the decision to write the day down in a form you can sort.

There is a second case worth knowing before you go. Not every goshuin carries a date: some are written without one, and at some places you receive a sheet already written and dated, or already written with the date left blank. In all of those the day in your own note, or the day your photograph was taken, is the only date you will have.

Small coins, and when the office is open

Carry small coins every day, and check the hours of anywhere you are going specifically for a goshuin. These are the two things that stop a visit going the way you planned, and neither is about etiquette.

On money: offices at shrines and temples are frequently cash only, and many of them cannot break a large note. The amount offered differs by shrine and temple, and the right way to find it is the notice posted at the office — so what you prepare is not an amount but a form: small coins, daily, before you set out.

On hours: goshuin are written by a person, and that person is not always there. The Miyagi Prefecture Shrine Association notes that hours differ from shrine to shrine and that a priest or member of staff is not always present. A small shrine may write goshuin only on certain days; an office may close well before the grounds do. If a goshuin is the reason you are making a particular journey, check the hours the way you would check a museum's.

What this is not

Treating the list as a schedule is the failure mode. A goshuin marks a visit that happened; it is not a target, and the number in your book is not a score. If the office is closed, or the shrine does not write them, you have still been there, and that was the point of going.

It is also worth deciding, before you leave, what you are not going to photograph. Where photography is permitted differs from place to place, and a page being written is not a photograph to take without asking.

Before you leave: the short version

Read it once, and you can stop thinking about it for the rest of the trip.

1. One book, with a rough count of pages against places, and a plan to buy the second in Japan if you run low.
2. Where the first one comes from, with a fallback in case the first place does not offer books.
3. Small coins, restocked daily.
4. One photograph of each page on the day, and the name in text the same day. This is the one that cannot be done later.
5. Both forms of the date — as written on the page, and in the Western calendar — if you are keeping a record at all.

Then the trip is the trip. What to do with the book afterwards — putting the pages in the order you visited, working out which place a page came from, reading an era-dated day — is a separate job, done at home, and it goes quickly if the fourth item on that list happened.