Your goshuincho filled up mid-trip: three ways forward, and how to read it back home

This article covers two things only: what to do when your goshuincho runs out of pages during a trip, and how to read the result once you are home. It does not cover how to ask for a goshuin, or the etiquette of receiving one.

My goshuincho is full and I am still travelling. What now?

You have three ways forward, and none of them is a mistake: buy a second book, turn the book over and use the backs of the pages, or ask whether a pre-written sheet is available. Which one you take depends on what is in front of you that afternoon, not on a rule you have broken.

The decision is smaller than it feels. What is larger, and almost never mentioned, is what happens afterwards. One trip that used to live in one book now lives in two books and perhaps a few loose sheets, and the order you visited in is the part that no longer survives on the paper. That is the half of this problem this article spends most of its words on.

The three ways forward, side by side

Buy a second book

Shrines and temples sell goshuincho at the office where goshuin are received, and many have a design of their own, drawn from the place. Ordinary stationery shops and bookshops in Japan carry them too, so being away from a large city does not leave you stuck.

One thing worth settling before you choose is size. Goshuincho are not all the same dimensions, and a book chosen for its cover may turn out taller than the one in your bag. Nobody will refuse to write in it for that reason, but two sizes do not sit together on a shelf, and the number of pages differs from book to book as well.

Use the backs of the pages

This is the option most travellers do not know they have, because it depends on how the book is made.

An accordion goshuincho is not a stack of separate leaves. It is one long strip of washi, folded back and forth like a concertina, with stiff covers at each end. Fold a strip that way and it has two runs of writing faces: a front run, and a back run you reach by turning the whole book over. The back run is not a workaround. Accordion pages are made of two plies of washi glued back to back precisely so that the ink of one face does not reach the other.

A stitched book is built differently — a single thinner sheet — and its owners keep to one side more often for that reason. And in either kind, some owners leave the back run blank simply because they want each page clean. Neither choice is the correct one. If you want the arithmetic of how many faces you actually have left, what sizes and page counts a goshuincho comes in, and how the binding decides them counts it out.

Whether a given shrine or temple will write on a page whose other face already carries a goshuin is left to that shrine or temple. There is no national rule to quote, so the reliable move is to open the book to the page you mean and ask at the office.

Ask about a pre-written sheet

Many shrines and temples keep goshuin already written on separate sheets of paper, for days when no one is available to write or the office is busy. If your book is full and you do not want a second one yet, this is the way to still receive something that day.

The catch is not the paper, it is the filing. A sheet in an envelope has no page number and no neighbours, so a month later a stack of sheets tells you nothing about which came before which. What a pre-written goshuin on loose paper is, and how to keep one so you can still place it later goes through that separately.

Ten minutes at the hotel beats an hour at home

Before you fly home, photograph every page of both books in order, and photograph the loose sheets in the order you received them. This is the one task that cannot be done later, because it is the only one that depends on memory rather than on the paper.

Three things make a photograph useful afterwards:

1. One goshuin per photograph, with the written date in frame. Photographing a whole spread to save time costs you the ability to place one of the two later.
2. Photograph on the day, not at the end of the week. Your phone writes the date the photograph was taken into the file, and if you shoot each page on the day you received it, that date and your visit date are the same. Shoot everything the night before your flight and the file dates all collapse onto one day.
3. Photograph the covers too, including the inside of the front cover. That is where a number and a start date go, and a photograph of it saves you from working out which book was first.

If you only do one of the three, do the second.

Why the record breaks, and not the paper

Back home, nothing is wrong with your books. What is wrong is that three separate pieces of information have gone missing at once, and each one hides the loss of the others.

• Which book. Two part-used books look alike from the outside, and the goshuin inside do not say which cover they sat behind.
• What order. Page order used to answer this. Split across two books and a few loose sheets, page order answers it only within each book.
• What date. The date is written on most goshuin, but it is written in a Japanese era — the era name, then the year within that era. Your phone, your calendar and your flight confirmations are all in the Western calendar, so every date has to be converted before anything can be sorted.

The third one is where people give up, because it is not hard so much as repetitive: one date is nothing, thirty dates is an evening. It also has a trap. An era can change part-way through a Western year, and if you sort by the year number while ignoring the era, the oldest goshuin can land at the end of the list. How to read the Japanese era date written on a goshuin, and where sorting goes wrong sets out the boundaries and the failure.

What you can ask of your records later

The reason to keep the book and page, and not only the date, is that different questions need different parts.

Keep only the date and the last two questions become unanswerable. Keep only the book and page and the first one does. Two books is exactly the point at which one of these stops being enough.

What an app can do with two books

The app I make, Goshuin Ledger, exists for this situation, so it is fair to say plainly what it does and does not do.

You pick the photographs of your pages from your photo library, several at a time. Each arrives with the date you took the photograph already filled in as the visit date, and you correct them — one at a time, or a whole range at once — keeping the Japanese era as it is written on the goshuin. Then you choose a book, and page numbers are assigned within that book. A book can carry a name, the shrine or temple you bought it at, the date you started using it, and one of its photographs as its cover. Searching by name, by its reading, by note, by a Japanese-era visit date, or by type returns which book and which page a goshuin is on.

Things it does not do, which matter here. Page numbers are assigned in the order you add photographs, at the end of the book — not read from the paper. If you add them out of order, you move them one step at a time. A goshuin written across two pages counts as one page, so in a book containing one, later page numbers sit lower than the numbers you would count on paper. There is no field for the date you finished a book, and it does not sync between devices.

One book takes as many goshuin as you like and needs no purchase. Making a second book inside the app needs the one-time Ledger Full — which is to say that, if your trip filled one book and started another, the purchase is part of the plan from the beginning rather than something you run into later. Adding imported photographs to a book one at a time also needs no purchase; adding a whole batch at once comes with Ledger Full. The App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is set out on the pricing section, and the same division between paper books and recorded books is covered in keeping a record per book so you never lose track of which book is which.

What is left to the shrine or temple, and what is left to you

Two of the decisions in this article are not yours. Whether the backs of your pages will be written on, and whether a pre-written sheet is available that day, are matters for each shrine or temple, and vary from one to the next. Asking at the office is not an imposition; it is the only way to find out.

Everything else is yours, and none of it is urgent except the photographs. A goshuin is the mark of a visit you actually made, and the reason to record it carefully is to be able to return to that day years later — not to count how many you have gathered. A book that filled up mid-trip is evidence that the trip went well.