The date on your kakioki goshuin is blank. Do you write it in yourself?

This article covers one thing: how to think about a kakioki goshuin — one written in advance and handed over on its own sheet — that arrived with no date on it. It does not go into what any particular shrine or temple expects of you.

First of all, there is no nationwide rule

Nothing nationwide decides who writes the date on a kakioki goshuin, or how. Goshuin are given out by each shrine and temple according to its own thinking, and the date is part of that.

So this article does not hand you the right answer either. It sets out the choices you have, and the thinking each one rests on. The decision is yours, and when you are unsure, follow what the shrine or temple that gave you the sheet says.

Why is the date space on a kakioki empty at all?

Because a kakioki is written and set aside before it is handed over, and the day of handing over cannot be written in ahead of time.

The circumstances that lead a place to prepare sheets in advance vary, but since they are written before it is settled when they will be given out, leaving the date alone open is a common shape.

What the empty space then means also differs from place to place. Two forms of it:

1. The day is written in at the office as the sheet is handed over. The date of that day goes on as you receive it.
2. The sheet is handed over empty, for the visitor to write in. Here the empty space is not something anyone forgot.

Which of the two you are holding is not always something you can tell on the spot.

The office may write it in as you receive it

With a sheet whose date space is empty, asking right there, as you receive it, whether the day can be written in is the surest thing you can do.

Ask at the office whether they could write the date in, and sometimes they will. It depends on the place and on the moment, though: in a crowded season, or when the person who writes is in the middle of other work, it may not be possible.

If you could not ask on the day — or you only noticed the empty space later, while working through a backlog of photographs and sheets — then the choice in front of you is to write it in yourself, or to leave the paper alone and keep the date in your record.

If you write it yourself, which day do you write?

If you are putting the date on a kakioki yourself, the day you visited is the natural one to write. A goshuin is widely received as proof of a visit, which keeps it separate from the day the sheet reached your hands and the day you pasted it into your book.

There is one case where that thinking changes: a goshuin received by post, which the next section takes up.

As for the form, a date written on a goshuin is customarily in a Japanese era. Matching that when you write keeps the sheet readable beside your other goshuin. The days Reiwa, Heisei and Showa change over, and why sorting on the era numbers alone puts your goshuin in the wrong order are laid out in a table in a separate article.

If time has passed since you received it, confirm the visit date before you write. The date a photograph was taken is a clue, but when you photographed a batch of sheets on some later day, that date is not the day you visited. How to spot a photograph whose capture date is not the visit date, and how to trace the visit date back is written up separately.

What about a goshuin received by post?

A goshuin received by post, without a visit, has no visit date. Some shrines and temples do send goshuin out by post.

The day it arrived, the day you applied, or no date at all — which of those is right follows the thinking of the place that sent it. Their notice about sending them out sometimes says, so read that first.

In your own record, the practical thing is to keep it marked as one that came by post. Drop a bare date into the same field you use for the ones you received on a visit, and later there is nothing to tell them apart. A line in the note settles it.

This is not a question of whether something is rude. The distinction is there so that you are not the one in difficulty later.

The third choice: leave the paper, and record it elsewhere

There is a third way with the visit date of a kakioki: do not write it on the paper at all, and keep it with the photograph and in your record instead. This is not a choice between writing and not writing. If this article has one thing to say, it is this.

What is good about it is that it secures the part that perishes while leaving the decision open. Whether to put ink on the paper can be decided at any point later. A memory of which day you were there does not come back once time has passed.

In practice: photograph the sheets one at a time, and put the visit date and the name of the shrine or temple into your record. The paper itself stays in storage, untouched. Decide later that you do want to write it in, and you can; decide that you would rather not, and the record is there all the same.

Kakioki are not the only case where no date stays on the paper. In a nokyocho — the book used on a temple pilgrimage — that carries no dates, where the seal is pressed onto the same page each time you go round, the paper cannot tell you which round happened when. How to record which round a stacked seal belongs to, working from the capture date of a photograph is another separate article.

Any of the three is fine, as long as the visit date is legible somewhere

The date on a kakioki can be handled in the three ways below, and with any of them nothing goes wrong later as long as the visit date survives somewhere.

None of the three is the correct one. What does go wrong is choosing none of them and leaving the sheets in a stack: the visit dates stop coming back to you, and then every one of the three becomes hard to take. Photographing a stack of sheets you never pasted in, one at a time, working out the place and the visit date, and putting them in order is written up separately.