Before you lose count of your goshuincho: keep the record book by book

This article covers one thing only: how to hold the paper and the record once you own more than one goshuincho. It does not go into how to choose a book, or where to buy one.

I have lost track of which goshuincho I am on. How should I manage them?

Give both the paper and the record the same division: the book. With the division on only one of the two sides, you will lose track sooner or later.

Books accumulate — that is simply what happens if you receive goshuin. The number of pages differs from book to book, and a run of goshuin written across a spread fills one that much faster. Buy a cover you like on a trip and you are one book up again.

The trouble is that the books multiply while the photographs stay in a single row. The back half of book 1 and the front half of book 2 belong to the same stretch of time, and later nothing tells them apart. The order the work goes in — settling the visit dates first, then placing each photograph in its book and page — is set out in the article that covers organising the whole pile.

What you can do on the paper first

On the paper, write three things inside the front cover or on the endpaper: a running number, the date you started the book, and your name. It takes nothing but a pen.

The running number and the start date. Something like “Book 1 — from the 4th month of Reiwa 5” is enough. That alone fixes the order the books stand in on a shelf. Nothing prescribes where you write it or how.

Your name. Where a shrine or temple takes the book in at the office and writes it behind the counter, your book sits in a row with other people's. Many owners write their name inside the front cover or on the endpaper so that the wrong book is not handed back.

In the record, hold the book and the page as units

Give the record both a book number and a page number, and the paper and the record correspond one to one. The paper already has the book as its division and the page as its order, so the record uses the same units.

This is not merely a matter of tidiness. It means that what you see when you open the book and what you see when you open the record are in the same order. When you want to remember what was on page 10 of book 3, you look at the same place in the record.

Group the record by shrine and temple, or by date, and that correspondence is gone. What you lose is the way you actually remember things: “the one about halfway through that book”.

Number pages from 1 again in each book

Do not run one sequence of page numbers across all your books; start again at 1 in each. “Page 10 of book 3” takes you straight there with the book open in your hands. “Number 85” in a single running sequence tells you nothing until you have counted back through the books to work out which page of which.

The difference shows again when a number has to be corrected. Add one entry you had forgotten and a single running sequence makes you renumber everything after it. Per-book numbering keeps the repair inside that one book.

Keep the page order and the visit-date order in separate fields

The page order and the visit-date order usually agree, but not always. Two cases where they part:

• You kept a pre-written sheet loose for a while and pasted it into whatever page was still empty
• You had two part-used books on the go and used one or the other depending on where you were going

In either case, inferring a visit date from the page order — or assigning page numbers in visit-date order — puts one of the two out of step with the paper. Keep them apart: the page is a place on paper, the visit date is a point in time.

What you are trying to remember decides which field you search

Which field helps depends on what you want to remember. Checking before a return visit whether you already received a goshuin at a place is covered in its own article; the fields that do the work there are the shrine or temple name and its reading.

Keep only one of those fields and only some of those questions can be answered. The fourth one needs two at once: the book and the visit date together.

When should book and page go into the record?

Put them in the record the moment you start a second book. Both are things you can still work out later by leafing through the paper — but every extra book makes that work heavier.

While there is only one book, every goshuin is somewhere in that one book. Leave it until you are on your third and you will be leafing through three books against each photograph, one photograph at a time. And if no running number is written on the paper, there is no fact of the matter about which book is which to begin with.

Pre-written sheets you have not pasted in are the exception. They have no place on paper yet, so leave the book and page empty and fill them in on the day the sheet goes into a book.

Two fields come before book and page, though: the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple. Both can be taken from the paper wherever the goshuin carries them legibly, but a goshuin written without a date, or a name in a cursive hand you cannot read, leaves fewer and fewer clues as the memory fades. Tracing a visit date from photographs and from the entries either side of it is a separate article, for when the date is missing or unreadable. So is sorting the fields by whether they can still be added later or not, which lays the whole set out field by field.

Should shrines and temples go in separate books?

No nationwide rule says whether to keep shrines and temples in separate goshuincho. Some owners separate them; others keep everything in one book.

There is a case on the other side, though. Some temples, on doctrinal grounds, prefer not to write in a book that already holds goshuin from other traditions. The example usually given is the goshudai (御首題) received at Nichiren-shū temples — the daimoku written out for you — and how it is handled differs from temple to temple. If it concerns you, ask on the day at the office (the juyosho at a shrine, the nokyosho at a temple).

Seen from the record, separating them only adds one more book. You do not have to settle the question in advance; when the need appears, you add a book.

The same holds if you also collect gojoin, the castle seals, and are wondering whether they need a book of their own: nothing different happens in the record. Whether to keep them in separate books, and how to look back over both from a single record is covered separately.

Closing a finished book, and starting the next one

When a book is full, close it in the record too, and it will not run together with the next one. There are two things to do: note the book's last page number and the date you finished it, and start the next book's page numbers at 1.

The date you finished can usually stand as the most recent visit date in that book. If the front cover already says “from the 4th month of Reiwa 5”, adding “to the 9th month of Reiwa 7” makes the span of each book legible at a glance on the shelf.

A finished book gains no more pages, which also makes it a good candidate for printing its record on paper and keeping that beside it. Wait until you have entered all of that book's photographs, though, or the count will still be changing when you print. What to put on the paper when you print a book at a time, and how to mark the edition so a reprint is easy to place is covered separately.

Whether a finished book can be handed over for ceremonial burning (otakiage) is treated differently from one shrine or temple to the next, so ask in advance.

Counting the books is not a way of showing how many you have. A book is a shelf, not a score. The reason to record which book is which is so that you can find things later.

How this works in the app I develop

The app I develop, Goshuin Ledger, records goshuin under a book and assigns the page numbers within each book for you. A book takes a name, any one photograph in it can be set as its cover, and you can keep the shrine or temple where you bought it and the date you started it. The visit date belongs to the goshuin rather than to the page, so when the page order and the visit-date order disagree, neither has to be rewritten. Search by shrine or temple name, reading, note, a visit date in its Japanese era (“Reiwa 3”, for instance), or the type, and the results say which book and which page each one is in.

There are things it does not do. Page numbers are not read off the paper: each entry goes to the end of the book in the order you add it. If you entered them in an order the paper does not match, you reorder with Up and Down, and one move only swaps an entry with the page next to it. A goshuin written across a spread counts as one page rather than two, so in a book that has one, every page number after it is lower than the page you would count on the paper. There is no field for the date you finished a book either; if you want to keep it, it goes into the book's name.

The first book needs no purchase and takes as many entries as you like. Making a second book and beyond inside the app needs the one-time “Ledger Full”. So if you already own two or more paper goshuincho and want the record divided the way the paper is, the purchase is part of the plan from the start rather than something you meet later. The App Store shows the current price. What Ledger Full covers is set out in the pricing section.

Besides book and page, which columns a list needs and where to keep the list itself is covered separately, and so is what to check before you change phones when the record has to move to a new device.