Collecting Goshuin: my favorite Japanese souvenir and activity

(Jump to goshuin)

The Japanese are obsessed with collectable stamps, and apparently I’m right there with them. These are not your Grandpa’s postage stamps. The Japanese have contemporary ink stamps with unique designs that are scattered all over the country like a secret and endless scavenger hunt. There are two main types of stamps: 1) free rubber stamps found at train stations, shops, and attractions, and 2) the goshuin, hand-made calligraphic seals that are painted and stamped at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines to mark a devotee’s (or, these days, any visitor’s) pilgrimage to the site. While hunting down the free rubber stamps was fun, collecting the goshuin became one of my favorite activities in Japan. By week’s end, I had assembled a one-of-a-kind souvenir that can never be exactly replicated. It turned out to be the favorite thing I brought home after a month of traveling through Asia.

Left: My goshuincho‘s cover, the special book used to collect goshuin. Right: The Hōzō-ji Temple in Kyoto and the goshuin I got there.

How-to

To collect goshuin, you need to have a special book called a goshuincho. These accordion-style books are regulation size and made with thick paper to hold the ink. Most temples and shrines sell their own unique goshuincho, or you can just buy them at shops. We took the easiest route and just bought ours at Tokyo’s Senso-ji Temple, which was our first goshuin stop.

Japanese reads right-to-left and the goshuincho is no different, so by Western sensibilities they’ll start inscribing at “the back” of the book and work towards the front. You can just hand the calligrapher the book and s/he’ll find the first blank page, and they’ll usually confirm you want the stamp put there. Depending on how busy the temple or shrine is, the transcriber will either write the seal in front of you or give you a numbered chip for you to come back and collect your book a bit later. It usually takes less than 5 minutes. You’ll pay about 500 Japanese Yen per seal (3 EUR / 3.50 USD at time of writing), technically as a “thank you” to the calligrapher rather than direct payment for the service.

Etiquette

Traditionally, getting a goshuin required you to pay your respects or pray at the temple or shrine. As a modern foreigner who’s agnostic, my interpretation of “paying my respects” was to cleanse my hands and mouth at the fountain, remove my shoes if I went inside any buildings, and silently admire the surroundings. Sometimes, when I felt moved to do so, I would perform the Japanese prayer ritual: bow twice, clap twice, bow once more at the altar.

The goshuincho is considered a sacred and personal artifact. Therefore you should not put any other writing or stamps inside it, including the free stamps or even your own handwritten notes (loose-leaf materials are fine though, and many temples will place small informational pamphlets next to their seals). Finally, under no circumstances should you video or photograph the seal-making process without being given explicit permission. This is a common rule across Japan, where recording any strangers is basically taboo.

The uniqueness of goshuin

Below, I’ve scanned all 36 goshuin I collected, including their locations and a custom map at the bottom if you want to retrace my steps. Amazingly, even if you did it in the exact same order as me, your goshuincho will look different from mine for various reasons. Most obviously, the visit date is inscribed in each seal. The calligrapher or calligraphy might vary too, like at temple #18, the same calligrapher gave us wildly different seals that translated to different blessings from Buddha (we know this for sure because he was kind enough to explain).

Some components will just change over time too. We arrived right at the beginning of sakura (cherry blossom) season, so many of my seals have sakura stamps in them (see top right in #8 and top center in #9). Others differ based on the date, like the raccoon-dog in #3 is inked in purple because we visited on the 5th of the month, which is an auspicious day. I’ve even heard of goshuin elements differing based on the daily weather. Finally, there might be different designs for you to pick from. Sometimes it’s because there are multiple shrines (i.e. enshrining different Shinto deities) at a single site, but it also seems they’re embracing the growing popularity of goshuin collecting by offering more options (at #15 there were about 5 options, including multi-page seals).

The name and city of the temple/shrine location is listed below each image in bold. The map is at the very end. Another good resource is this website (Japanese only), where you can search by temple or shrine to get a preview of what the goshuin will look like.

Whether the seal was handwritten or a paper-insert only is listed in italics. Some shrines and temples, especially very popular ones, will only offer goshuin as premade paper inserts that you can tape or glue into your book yourself. The quality varies. Sometimes they’re still handwritten (#6 and 10), but others are just mass-printed with the date added later (#3). We got three of these before we turned into purist snobs who only collected a goshuin if it was handwritten into the book. Paper-insert versions are fine, but they interrupt the aesthetic flow of the book, since their paper is white while my goshuincho paper was a natural cream (e.g. photo 3), and being handed a printed piece of paper didn’t quite have the same impact as watching someone inscribe my personal goshuincho after paying my respects to the site. To each their own – which is basically the entire point of a goshuincho!

The Map (which also includes some free-stamp locations)