Goshuin-Cho Update

Warning: complaining coming.

For as long as I can remember in my life, I have been a collector. Football cards. Comic books. Stamps. Star Wars figures. Baseball cards. Coins. Records. CDs. Bobbleheads. Art. Autographs. Funko Pops. Funko Pop Incredible Hulks. I am sure I could go on and on and on and on.

A lot of my collections are long since abandoned (NOT, I should note, the Funko Pop Incredible Hulks) but in 2017, I picked up the start of a new collection: Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. This collection started on the slopes of Mount Fuji in May 2017 and continued as recently as this past April in Tokyo. While my collection of Japanese temples and shrines is very much experience and memory based (since I'm not ACTUALLY acquiring the actual properties), there is a physical manifestation to this collection: the goshuin.

Goshuin are temple seals, stamped images which are then personalized with calligraphy by the monks resident at the property you are visiting. A collection of goshuin is traditionally kept in a goshuin-cho, or temple seal book, which opens accordian-style to record your memories. Or I guess to allow others to record your memories would be more technically correct. Fill your goshuin-cho with a series of stamped and written souvenirs and you create a keepsake which is likely unique in this world. It really records your personal journey throughout Japan.

Since we had a few temple and shrine visits on our agenda for this trip, we brought the goshuin-cho we purchased at the Komitake Shrine on Mount Fuji all those years ago to get that volume a bit closer to being filled up.

But this year, collecting goshuin did not go as planned. We found a few things that were different.

What we had found at every temple and shrine we visited before this year was that you got a goshuin in exchange for about 300 yen. Sometimes we had to wait if the property was mobbed with people but that wasn't really a big deal. We'd just drop off our goshuin-cho as soon as we got to the temple or shrine and pick it up 20 minutes or so later.

The first temple we visited on this trip was Gotōkuji Temple west of the city, a veritable celebration of the waving cat (or maneki-neko) that populates Japanese and other sorts of Asian restaurants all over the United States and I'm sure the world. We found the temple shop, entered, inquired about a goshuin, handed over 300 yen and got a pre-stamped, pre-calligraphed (is that actually a word?) sheet of paper just a bit smaller than our goshuin-cho handed back to us.

What is this? A pre-printed sheet of paper? That's not what we wanted. What are we supposed to do with this? Glue it in the book? Really? Is this a cutback on labor? Are the monks who write out the goshuin out to lunch or just not working that day? It was pretty confusing. And no, we didn't pepper the dude behind the counter with all these questions. He didn't seem super engaged. 

This was shocking. And it was not the last time it happened. We purchased another pre-printed sheet at Kita-in Temple in Kawagoe and found no handwritten-on-the-spot option at Hikawa Shrine (also in Kawagoe) or at the cemetery of the 47 rōnin at Sengaku-ji. We stopped buying after Kita-in. Couldn't come to terms with whole thing, especially after discovering the second piece of paper we were handed in exchange for our yen was larger than our goshuin-cho. Disaster. What are we supposed to do with a piece of paper bigger than the actual book that it goes in?

Now admittedly, this did not happen at every temple and shrine we visited. We did get some actual goshuin written and stamped in our goshuin-cho. And because I've been recording in this blog which goshuin came from which site, I am doing the same thing here. The three pictures below record the filling of one side (minus one page) of our Komitake Shrine goshuin-cho. As usual and because it's Japan, I'm listing the goshuin right to left.

Sensō-ju Temple, Tokyo (right) from 2024; Gotōkuji Temple (preprinted), Tokyo (left).

Meiji Jingu Shrine, Tokyo (right); Fukagawa Fudō-dō, Tokyo (left).

Kita-in Temple (preprinted), Kawagoe (right); Matsuchiyama Shoden Temple, Tokyo (left).

I love the green stamp on the goshuin from Fukagawa Fudō-dō by the way. This is our second goshuin with different colored stamps (after Tomioka Hachiman last year). I'm also a little disappointed that the Matsuchiyama Shoden goshuin doesn't have a big old radish in it but I'm probably projecting 21st century western sensibilities there.

After our visit to Matsuchiyama Shoden, we were left with one blank page in our original goshuin-cho and we had just one more temple left on this trip: Sengaku-ji. Since the story associated with Sengaku-ji was so powerful for me (read about it here), we decided to go ahead and retire our Komitake Shrine goshuin-cho and buy a new one with an image pertinent to Sengaku-ji on the cover. Is this just blatant consumerism? Maybe. We wanted a new book and the right one was available. It's the book with the green paper sleeve in the cover picture of this post and immediately below.

And yes, I know that means we have a book with one page on one side of the book blank and had the whole other side entirely empty. Deal with it. We are.

Our new goshuin-cho is gorgeous. The front and back cover are yellow-gold in color and the front features what I can only assume are 36 of the 47 rōnin that avenged Lord Asano Naganori's death a little more than 300 or so years ago. It is different than the first goshuin-cho that we bought way back in 2017: the cover is paper (and not cloth) and the book is a little larger (which may explain why the pre-prepared goshuin we picked up in Kawagoe is bigger than the only goshuin-cho we owned at that time.

I mentioned earlier in this post that there were no on-the-spot goshuin available at the cemetery at Sengaku-ji but we still got our goshuin from our visit because there are actually two available at this temple. Although I will admit, I am disappointed that I couldn't get a temple seal from the very spot that the 36 rōnin (I guess 47 wouldn't fit?) on the cover are resting forever.

The goshuin that the monk who sold us our new goshuin-cho added to our new book was very different in one respect from all the other goshuin we have collected: it was free.

So that previous statement isn't exactly true. It's true that we didn't pay cash or credit for our goshuin at Sengaku-ji. But it wasn't completely free. It required the copying of a sutra or a piece of scripture by me while we were on property. And it's all in Japanese.

This could have been challenging. I mean I've never written in kanji before so I imagined my effort would be very, very sloppy as I copied a few dozen or more Japanese characters using a calligraphy pen from an example sheet to a brand new piece of paper.

They didn't make me do that. I was directed a series of drawers which contained different sutras, all printed on the back side of what looked to me like a sheet of vellum. I was simply required to trace over the letters with my pen. I am sure my attempt was less than perfect but it looks pretty impressive in the photograph above. I'm sure I flagged at the end and got a little sloppy. There are a lot of characters to copy.

It got me the goshuin below, the first entry in our brand new goshuin-cho which is now ready for more filling. When are we headed back to Japan again?