For anyone holding a stack of goshuin sheets they never pasted in

This article covers one thing only: how to identify the kakioki goshuin that piled up unpasted, and put them back in order. It does not cover which glue or tape to use, or how to paste a sheet in.

I have a stack of sheets and I can no longer tell which came from where

Put the pasting decision off, and settle which sheet, which place and which day first. Reversing the order is the short way out of this state.

The reason so many people stall at this point is that pasting involves too many decisions. Which book to use, what order to put them in, which adhesive, what to do if it goes wrong — a lot to settle, and none of it undoable. So the stack goes into a drawer, and another year passes with it there.

Identifying them, by contrast, needs almost no decisions. You read what is written and you record it. And once the identifying is done, nothing you do with the sheets afterwards leaves you anything to undo.

What happens if you leave the stack as it is?

Starting with the ones you cannot read, the sheets stop being placeable at all — neither the place nor the day. The clue that is not written on the paper, your memory of that day, fades as time passes.

Even when the name of the shrine or temple is brushed onto the goshuin, a cursive hand can be unreadable. While the visit is still recent you can say "that's the place we went to that day"; two years on, more and more of them will not come back. If you went round several places in one day, more so again.

Where you received several goshuin at one place, a stack also loses which ones belong to the same day. A goshuin pasted into a book carries page order as a clue; a stack of sheets carries no order at all.

Photograph them one at a time, and put them in visit-date order

Three steps: photograph each one on its own, settle the ones you can read, and put them in visit-date order.

1. Photograph every one of them, one at a time. Do not lay them out and take a single shot of the lot — you will not be able to handle them individually afterwards. There is no need to stall over getting a good photograph; readable enough for the name and the date is enough. A photograph records when it was taken, so at the very least you keep the order in which you had each sheet in your hands.

2. Settle the ones you can read. Read off the name of the shrine or temple and the visit date written on the goshuin. The visit date is often entered in a Japanese era, near 奉拝 (hōhai, a word meaning that you have respectfully paid your respects). Set anything you cannot read aside, and clear the readable ones first.

3. Put them in visit-date order. By this point the stack has turned into a list in the order you visited. For a sheet whose visit date you cannot read, the other photographs you took that day and your record of how you travelled narrow the range. The clues to follow when you do not know a sheet's visit date is a separate article that walks through them in order.

A stack will often contain sheets whose date space was left blank. Whether you may fill that space in yourself is a matter on which shrines and temples think differently, so whether to write on a blank-dated sheet or keep the date only in the record is laid out in another article. Even if you never write on the paper, keeping the visit date on the record side leaves you nothing to struggle with when reordering.

Once those three are done, the record is complete whether you go on to paste the sheets in or not.

Paste them in, sleeve them, or keep them as they are?

Once the identifying is done, choose your storage by whether you want a book to look back through, whether you have enough sheets to want to reorder them, and whether you want to hold the decision open.

None of the three is the correct one. No nationwide rule says a sheet must be pasted in, and plenty of people keep theirs in a folder made for the purpose. When the choice is not obvious to you, follow the guidance of the shrine or temple you received the sheet from.

That said, if you choose to keep the sheets as they are, do at least finish identifying them. Without that, all you have is the state you are in now, continuing.

Whether you sleeve them or keep them as they are, printing a list on paper with a note of where each sheet was put, and keeping that list to hand, lets you get from the list to the sheet itself. What to put on a printed record, and what to leave off is worked through in a separate article.

A record does not distinguish a pre-written sheet from one written in the book

A kakioki is one of the ways a shrine or temple decides to hand a goshuin over, and in a record it is the same single entry as one written in your book.

Kakioki (書き置き) is the form where you receive a goshuin already written on its own sheet of paper. Written in the book (直書き, jikagaki) is the form where it is brushed into your goshuin book on the spot. Busy seasons, how many people are available to write, care about infection — shrines and temples give out sheets only for a range of reasons of their own, and in recent years it is not unusual.

How you take the two forms differs from place to place and from person to person, and this article is not where that gets settled. But do not talk about sorting from the premise that "what I really wanted was one written in the book" — that is a line worth holding when the subject is records.

Keep the paper original as the original

Photographing a sheet for the record does not mean you have to dispose of the paper.

A record is an index to the original, not a replacement for it. A photograph is a clue for finding what is where; it does not take over the meaning the sheet you were given carries in itself.

The whole flow of sorting is in "How to sort and record the goshuin photos piled up on your phone afterwards", and how to keep hold of things once the books start accumulating is in "Record each book separately, before you lose track of which one you are on".

In the app I am building

In "Goshuin Ledger", the app I am building, picking the photographs of your sheets from the photo library in one go lines them up in Imported photos. Importing a backlog of photographs in bulk, correcting the visit dates and adding them to a book is covered in a separate article. The visit date starts out as the photograph's capture date, so if you photographed the whole stack on one day, every entry carries that day. You look at the visit date written on each goshuin, correct it photograph by photograph (you can enter it in a Japanese era), and then add them to a book. As long as the visit dates are corrected, the record reads back in the order you visited rather than the order you imported.

A sheet you have not pasted into a book can be left without being added to any book at all, and that needs no purchase. Photographs imported in bulk can be added to a book first and then, from the record itself, returned to being in no book. Write the name of the folder you keep a sheet in into its note and search will find it; when you do paste it in, that is the moment to move it into a book.

Instead of leaving them out of a book, you can record them as one book of their own, kept apart from your goshuin books: that aligns the divisions in the record with where the paper is kept, at the cost of one more book. The first book records as many entries as you like without a purchase, and adding imported photographs to a book one at a time needs no purchase either. A second book and beyond, and adding two or more imported photographs to a book in one action, come with the one-time purchase "Ledger Full". What the purchase opens up is set out in the pricing section, and the App Store shows the price.