Which shrine or temple is this goshuin from? Identifying one after the trip

This article covers one thing only: working out which shrine or temple a goshuin you already hold came from. How to receive one, and what to say when you ask, are not covered here.

Where do you start when you cannot read the page?

Start with the black brush writing down the middle, not with the red seal. The name of the place is written there in ordinary kanji, so you can copy it character by character and search for it. The seal is usually carved in seal script — an old form of the characters kept for seals — and most people who read modern Japanese cannot read it either.

Two other things you already have narrow the answer down: the date written on the page, and the photographs on your phone from that day. Between them, the question stops being “which of the shrines and temples in Japan is this” and becomes “which of the three or four places I could have been that afternoon is this”.

What is actually on the page?

A goshuin is brush writing with one or more red seals over it, and the brush writing is the part that names the place. The usual arrangement has three elements, and only two of them are of any use to you.

• Top right: 奉拝, hōhai, roughly “I have paid my respects.” At a temple a different phrase may sit here. It is the same on almost every page, so skip it.
• Middle: the name. The shrine or temple, or the deity or principal image enshrined there. This is the line to copy.
• Left: the date, nearly always as a Japanese era year.

Over the writing sit the seals. At a temple the impression is often the temple’s own treasure seal combined with a temple-name seal and a mountain-name seal, and it frequently contains a Sanskrit seed syllable standing for the Buddha. At a shrine you usually get a shrine-name seal, often alongside the shrine’s crest. Composition varies a great deal from one place to the next rather than following a single rule, so do not expect two pages to be laid out alike. What a goshuin is, and what it was originally a receipt for, is a separate article.

Five clues, cheapest first

Work down this list and stop as soon as one of them gives you a name. Each row costs more effort than the one above it.

Copy the name, then search it

Copy the middle line character by character even if you cannot read it, and search for it together with the name of the town you were in. Handwriting input on a Japanese keyboard, or the camera lookup in a dictionary app, will accept a shape you cannot name.

Three things make this easier than it sounds.

• The ending is usually the clearest part. Names commonly end in 神社 (jinja) or 大社 or 宮 (gū) for a shrine, and 寺 (tera, -ji) or 院 (-in) for a temple. Those characters are short and regular, and they tell you at once which kind of place you are looking for.
• Brush writing joins its strokes. A character can look nothing like its printed form. Copy only the ones you are confident of and leave the others as gaps; a search for two certain characters plus a place name usually beats a search for five uncertain ones.
• The name on the page is not always the place’s name. It may be the deity or the principal image enshrined there instead. If a search for the characters returns something that reads as a name of a deity rather than a location, search that together with the town — the place that enshrines it is often the answer.

Convert the date, then compare it with your itinerary

The date is a Japanese era year, so convert it before you set it against your travel dates. Reiwa began on 1 May 2019, and a Reiwa year plus 2018 gives the Gregorian year, so a page marked as the eighth year of Reiwa was written in 2026. Older books reach further back: Heisei ran from 8 January 1989 to 30 April 2019, and Shōwa from 25 December 1926 to 7 January 1989. How the era year is written on a goshuin, and where the boundaries fall has the rest of it.

Once you have a calendar date, everything else you kept from the trip becomes evidence. Accommodation bookings, rail passes, entry tickets and card statements all carry dates, and they place you in one city rather than another for that day. Where the goshuin has no date, tracking the visit date down from the photograph instead is the way round.

Use the photos that surround it

The photo of the goshuin is not the only photo from that moment. Your library is sorted by capture time, so look at what you took in the ten minutes either side. A torii, a gate, a signboard, a plan of the grounds at the entrance, a bus stop, a station sign — the name is often written on one of them in characters far larger and more regular than the brush writing.

If location was switched on, your photo library will also show you where each photo was taken on a map. That narrows the search to a neighbourhood, and a map of that neighbourhood usually has only one or two candidates on it.

One caution: a photo that reached you through a messaging app, or a screenshot of one, will often have lost its capture date and place along the way. Check the date against the page before you trust it.

Confirm a candidate rather than trying to read the seal

Once you have a name to test, the seal becomes useful — as a check, not as a starting point. Search for the candidate’s name together with the word goshuin and compare the shape of the impression and the crest with your page.

There is also a public database of seal-script character forms, run by the Center for Open Data in the Humanities, which works in the direction that helps you: you type a character you suspect, and it shows you historical seal-script forms of it to compare against the impression on your page. It is a research tool rather than a reader — it will not tell you what an unknown seal says.

Be honest with yourself about the limit here. Whether a place uses the same seal from one year to the next, and whether every goshuin it grants carries the same design, is left to each shrine and temple. A seal that does not match is not proof that your candidate is wrong, and one that does match is not proof that it is right.

The ones you cannot pin down

Set them aside and finish the readable pages first. This is not a delay — it is what makes the hard ones solvable. Once every page you can read is in date order, an unknown page is bracketed by the visits on either side of it, and that window is usually hours rather than months.

When you do record an unsolved page, write down the characters you were sure of, not a guess. A name entered as though it were certain is worse than a blank: it will read as settled fact in a year’s time, and nothing in the record will tell you it was a guess. Keep the shape you read, the date, and a note that it is unconfirmed.

Sheets written on separate paper are the hardest case, because they never had a page position to bracket them. If you came home with a stack of loose ones, what to do with kakioki goshuin written on separate paper deals with them on their own terms, and putting a backlog of loose sheets into order goes through the sorting.

Keep the answer attached to the photo

Write the name, the visit date and what you could read into a record that sits with the photograph, or you will do this work twice. The second time is harder, because by then you have forgotten which pages you already checked.

Two decisions are worth making before you start rather than halfway through: which fields to keep and which you can add later, and the order to work in when you have a pile of photos and no records at all. If you are likely to go back to the same places, being able to search the record by name later also means you can check what you received last time before you visit again.

What this app does with it

Goshuin Ledger is the ledger kind of record: you import several photos at once, the capture date becomes the starting value for the visit date, you correct the dates, then add the photos to a book where the page numbers are assigned for you. That order matters for this job, because it puts the readable pages into visit order first and leaves the unknown ones bracketed between them.

You type the name of the shrine or temple yourself, with its reading if you want one. Once a name is saved, you can find that record again by the name, by the reading, by your own note, by the Japanese-era visit date or by the type — so the characters you managed to read, kept in the note, stay searchable instead of sitting in a separate file. Records stay on the device and are not synced between devices.

Recording in your first book needs no purchase and has no limit on how many entries it holds. A second book, and adding two or more imported photos to a book in one go, are part of the one-time Ledger Full purchase; the App Store shows the current price. What the purchase covers is set out on the home page.

Next time: a better version of the slip of paper

English-language guides to goshuin usually suggest tucking a slip of paper with the name into the book. It does work, and it is worth doing. But slips fall out, and it only helps for the places whose names you managed to catch at the time — which is exactly the case where you did not need the help.

Two habits cost less and fail less often.

1. Photograph the signboard at the entrance in the same minute as the goshuin. One extra photo, and the capture times tie the two together permanently. A board with the name on it outranks any slip of paper, because it cannot fall out.
2. Leave location switched on for the camera while you travel. It answers “where was this” for every photo at once, including the ones you did not think to label.

Where photography is asked to be kept to a minimum, or asked not to happen at all, that request comes first — where the line falls when photographing a goshuin goes through it. A goshuin is the record of a visit you made, not an item in a set, and no amount of careful record-keeping is worth taking in the grounds of a place that has asked you not to.