A nokyocho carries no date: recording the visit behind each stacked seal

This article covers one thing only: how to keep, outside the paper, a record of which round you were on and when, in a nokyocho that carries no dates. How to receive a seal, and how the practice differs from route to route, are not its subject.

Is the missing date an oversight?

Usually not. In a nokyocho received along a pilgrimage route, the brush writing very often carries no visit date at all. On an ordinary goshuincho page the day is normally written in a Japanese era near the characters for hōhai (奉拝), so if that is the format you know, the absence looks like something the writer forgot. (Why the day on a goshuin is written in an era, and where it slips when you copy it into a record, is in the article on era-dated goshuin.)

It does differ from place to place. Some routes and some temples write the date in, and even along a single route the practice is not necessarily uniform. This article assumes the book in your hands has no dates in it.

The upshot is that from the very first round, the paper holds only where each seal came from, never when. One round on its own may cost you nothing, because you remember it. The trouble begins with the second.

What is a kasane-in? From the second round, seals pile up on one page

Receiving the new seal on the same page as the first round, over the earlier impression, is called a kasane-in (重ね印). No new page is used, the brush writing stays as it was written the first time, and only the vermilion accumulates, round after round.

Whether a kasane-in is offered, whether the writing is redone, or whether a new page is used instead, differs between routes and between individual temples. Check the notice posted on the day, and ask at the nokyosho.

What this article is about is not whether to take one. It is what stops being readable once the seals overlap.

On paper, which round happened when stops being answerable

Three rounds of kasane-in leave three rounds of vermilion on one page, and nothing on the paper says which impression belongs to which round, or to which day. The same seal lands in nearly the same place each time, so beyond a slight difference in the depth of the red or a millimetre of offset there is nothing to tell them apart. And since there was no date to begin with, telling them apart would still not give you a when.

Three things are lost, specifically.

1. The span of each round. When you started it, and when you completed it.
2. The joins, when you walked it in stages. Which trip took you as far as which temple.
3. The visit date of each temple. Which day within the round you were at that one.

All three you can hold in your head while you are still walking. But a second round and a third blur together easily, and after a few years even "it rained on me at this temple" stops being reliably attached to one of them.

Since the paper will not hold the date, these three have to be kept outside it. The starting point is the capture date on your photographs. Working back from a capture date to a visit date, and the cases where the two come apart, is covered in the article on narrowing down a visit date from photo capture dates, and the same reasoning applies to a nokyocho.

Three ways to keep it outside the paper

There are three: photograph the page at every temple, photograph only the first and last temple of a round, or write the rounds and dates in a list. They differ in effort, and in how fine the date you end up with is. Combining them is fine.

Photograph the page on the day you receive the seal

Take one photograph of the page on the day you receive the seal, and the capture date stored with the photograph becomes the record of your visit. The date and time are written into the photograph, so there is nothing to write by hand.

A capture date is kept to the day, so it is enough to leave the grounds and photograph the page later the same day, at your lodging or in the car on the way back. If you photograph inside the grounds, follow the posted notice and what you are told at the nokyosho, and where you cannot tell, do not photograph there at all — how to check what each shrine and temple asks before photographing a goshuin goes through it. What does not work is photographing the whole book at the end of the trip: every capture date then lands on the last day, and the per-temple visit dates are gone.

There is a second benefit. Put each round's photographs side by side and the way the seals accumulate is itself preserved. Compare the first-round photograph against the second-round one and you can see roughly what the second round added. A kasane-in that is hard to read on paper becomes readable as the difference between two photographs.

Take just two photographs: the first temple and the last

If photographing at every temple is too much, one photograph at the first temple of a round and one at the last still preserves that round's span. If you walk the route in stages, photographing the first and last temple of each trip preserves the joins as well.

The cost is that the dates of the temples in between are not kept. If you need one later, you will be reconstructing it from other photographs taken along the way — the next section.

Write the rounds and dates in a list

Alongside the photographs, a list of four columns — round, started, completed, note — lets you take in the whole thing without hunting through photographs. Photographs keep the dates exactly, but nothing in a photograph says which round it belongs to.

Give the day where you know the day, and the month where you do not. Where you have entered an estimate, write "estimate" in the note.

Reconstructing rounds you have already walked, from photographs

Even with no photographs of the pages, ordering the photographs you took along the way by capture date recovers most of each round's span. The gate, the main hall, your lodging, the road itself — something taken near the temples has usually survived.

1. In your photo app, look through the period you were on the route, in capture-date order.
2. Cut the clusters of consecutive days into trips. A few days running, then a gap. The gap is the join.
3. Assign the trips to rounds, oldest first. Everything up to the trip you remember completing is the first round; the trip after it begins the second.
4. Write it in the list, and mark what you cannot settle as an estimate.

The photographs show you where the trips divide, but which trip belonged to which round still leans on memory. Enter it as an estimate rather than leaving it blank, and you can correct it when a clue turns up later.

In the app we make

Goshuin Ledger, the iPhone app we make, builds records with the capture date of the photograph as the starting value for the visit date. Pick several photos at once from your photo library and they line up in Imported photos with the capture date already filled in. Fix the visit date photo by photo, or a whole range at once, then add them to a book and its pages. A photo whose capture date cannot be read starts from the day you imported it, so correct those. The whole sequence — importing in one go the page photographs you built up along the way, through to having them settled in a book — is walked through step by step in how to register photos in bulk.

Here is what it can and cannot do for a kasane-in.

• One shrine or temple can hold as many records as you have visits. The photograph of the same page from the first round and the one from the second become two records, each with its own visit date.
• Search the shrine or temple name and its records come up newest visit date first, with the book and the page number each one is in.
• There is no feature that counts rounds. Write "2nd round" in the note and you can pull it back with that, because the note is searched too.

In this app a record added to a book goes onto a new page at the end of that book, and the page numbers are assigned for you. So a second-round record does not land on the same page as the first-round one, though you can reorder rows by moving them up or down. If you also want to keep which page of the paper book a seal sits on, add that to the note. Photos are saved scaled to about 2,048px on the long edge, so if you want to compare the fine detail of overlapping seals, keep the originals in your photo library as well.

Your first book needs no purchase and takes as many records as you like, and adding imported photos to a book one at a time needs no purchase either. Making a second book and beyond — keeping a nokyocho and a goshuincho in separate books, for instance — and adding two or more imported photos to a book at once are part of the one-time Ledger Full purchase. What a purchase adds is set out in the pricing section, and the App Store shows the current price.

The whole flow, from gathering a backlog of photographs in one place through to arranging them into books and pages, is in "how to organise and record the goshuin photos that piled up on your phone".