Why your goshuin came on a loose sheet of paper

This article covers one situation only: you asked for a goshuin, and instead of writing in your book, the person at the office handed you a sheet of paper. It does not cover which shrines and temples offer what, or what to pay anywhere.

Why did they hand me a sheet instead of writing in my book?

Because that goshuin was already written before you arrived. A goshuin prepared ahead of time on its own sheet of paper is called a kakioki (書き置き, also written 書置き). The brushwork and the seal are on washi or hanshi paper, not on a page of your book, so you take the sheet home and decide yourself where it ends up.

Nothing went wrong, and you were not turned away. If you handed over your goshuincho and it came back unmarked with a sheet tucked inside it, that is the normal shape of a kakioki, not a refusal.

If even the word is new to you, the various English names for the same thing — goshuin, shrine stamp, temple stamp, temple seal — are sorted out in what the different English names for a goshuin actually refer to.

What the shrines and temples themselves say

It is worth reading this from the side that hands the sheet over rather than from a visitor's guess.

Asahimori Tenmangū, a shrine in Tochigi, describes a kakioki as a goshuin already written — or printed — on washi paper, which means you will need to paste it into your book yourself. The same page adds the detail that answers most of the confusion on the grounds: even a place that normally writes straight into your book will fall back to a kakioki when the priest is not there.

Shōkō-ji, a temple, describes a kakioki as a goshuin prepared in advance and received on paper, and lists what it is good for: no queue, printed and seasonal designs that could not be brushed on the spot, and no need to be carrying a book at all.

Neither of them ranks the two forms. They describe two ways of receiving the same thing, with different merits, and leave the choice to the visitor.

The three reasons you will actually meet

None of the three is about you, your book, or the way you asked. A New Year period, a festival day, a funeral or another rite in the same hours — any of these can turn a place that usually writes by hand into a place giving out sheets that week.

Is a kakioki a lesser goshuin?

No one grades them, and a visitor is not the one to start. Both the shrine and the temple quoted above treat the two forms as alternatives. A sheet is often the only way a multi-colour or seasonal design can exist at all, and on a crowded day it is the only way a small office can receive everyone who came.

What a kakioki genuinely costs you is something else, and it has nothing to do with worth: the sheet arrives with no place in your book, so nothing about it records where it came from. That is the problem the rest of this article is about.

What do I do with it? Three ordinary answers

How a kakioki should be treated is left to each shrine and temple, and then to you. No nationwide rule tells you to paste it, or forbids it. If you want to know what one particular place would prefer, ask that place — a question on your next visit answers it properly, and no website can.

If the sheets have quietly become a stack at the bottom of a drawer, work through them in the order set out in sorting out a stack of loose goshuin sheets you never pasted in rather than starting with the glue.

The thirty seconds to spend before the sheet goes in your bag

Photograph the sheet where you are standing, and then photograph the name of the place. This is the part the guides leave out, and it is the only part of this article you cannot do later.

A goshuin written into your book is anchored by the book. It has a page number, it has the goshuin before it and after it, and even if you cannot read a single character, the page order tells you roughly when and in what sequence it happened. A loose sheet has none of that. In your bag it becomes one of several sheets covered in brushwork you may not read, in a script that does not separate a place name from a phrase, with no order and no neighbours.

Two photographs, a few seconds each:

1. The sheet, flat and whole, with the brushwork, the seal and any date in frame.
2. The name of the place — the nameplate at the entrance, the notice board, the sign over the office.

Your phone writes the date and time into each photograph it takes (this is EXIF, the information a camera stores inside the image file), so the second photograph is what ties the first one to a place, and the timestamps are what tie both to a day. If the sheet has no date on it, that timestamp is the only date you will have, and once you are on a plane there is no way back to it.

Take the two photographs even for a sheet you can read today. In a month, the brushwork you recognised as you received it is brushwork again.

If you are already past that point and holding sheets you cannot place, work from what is on them in working out which shrine or temple a goshuin came from.

Where the date on a sheet comes from, or does not

There are three patterns, and which one you get is decided by the place, not by a rule:

• Written in as the sheet is handed to you. The day is the day you visited.
• Left blank for you. The space is not an oversight; it is waiting.
• Printed in advance. Then the date on the paper is a date the place chose, which may not be the day you were there.

If yours is blank and you are wondering whether to fill it in yourself, that question has its own answer in whether to write the date on a kakioki goshuin yourself, and the short version is: ask on the grounds if you still can, and otherwise keep the date in your own record rather than on the paper.

When a date is written, it is usually in a Japanese era rather than the Western calendar — Reiwa, and Heisei before it. How to read the era dates on a goshuin and convert them has the changeover days, including the one that trips people up: 2019 contains both eras.

If your book filled up and everything after that was a sheet

This is common enough to plan for. A book that fills on day three of a trip turns every goshuin after it into a loose sheet, and by the end of the trip the sheets outnumber the pages. What to do at the office, and what to do with the sheets that follow, is in what to do when your goshuincho fills up in the middle of a trip.

What happens after you get home

Three things go wrong, always in the same order:

1. The sheets have no order. They are in the order they came out of the bag, which is not the order you visited.
2. One sheet cannot be placed. You know the day was busy; you do not know which of four places this one was.
3. The date is gone. No date on the paper, and by now no memory of the day either.

All three are the same problem: a sheet holds the goshuin, and nothing else. The information a page of a book carries on its own, a sheet needs you to have recorded somewhere else. That is what the two photographs on the grounds were for, and the process of turning them into something readable is set out in how to organise goshuin photos into a record afterwards.

The app I make, in one paragraph

I am the developer of Goshuin Ledger, an iOS app for exactly the state a trip leaves you in: photographs on the phone, sheets in an envelope, nothing in order. You pick several photographs at once, each arrives with its capture date already filled in as the visit date, you correct that date in its Japanese era where the paper disagrees, and then the entries are placed into a book and its pages. Records stay on the device, and there is no sign-in or account. One book needs no purchase and takes as many entries as you like; a second book and beyond, adding two or more imported photographs to a book in one action, and PDF or CSV export come with a single purchase of Ledger Full — what the purchase covers is listed on the home page, and the App Store shows the price.

Before you leave the grounds

• Receive the sheet as it is. Nothing went wrong.
• Read the notice at the office for what to leave. If nothing is posted, ask there.
• Photograph the sheet, flat and whole.
• Photograph the name of the place.
• Decide about glue later. That decision has no deadline; the two photographs do.