Medium Post #3

Through our study of the groups thought of as ‘lesser’ by the Japanese Empire in the 19th and 20th century (i.e. Korean, ‘buraku’, and Okinawan peoples) it has become obvious to me that most of the accounts of these people’s lives are missing. We only have limited accounts of these people’s lives and emotions and almost all of these accounts come from those doing the oppression. We learned about ‘buraku’ women and Korean people in Japan through government reports and Okinawan people through the family registry. This leads to the question: can we ethically and in good conscious write about these peoples lives knowing the limitations we have in the knowledge about them. In my opinion, I think that it is important that we tell these people’s stories to the best of our abilities using all of the sources we can. It would be a disservice to simply not recount their lives because there is bias in the sources. However, when we tell these peoples stories we must be careful to point out the bias in our sources and make it clear to the reader how limited our sources are. Being careful about how we represent these peoples using archival materials is different from erasing them from history. It is important to be careful when representing these peoples because the sources we have mostly come from the perspective of the oppressors. That means these sources for the most part do not tell the real story of the peoples and instead tell a fabrication that the oppressors want to portray the peoples as. But, this does not mean we are erasing them from history. There is much we can learn from biased sources and as long as we draw attention to the biases in them we can still make meaningful depictions of their lives.

The pandemic we are living through right now will be an important event in history and how we live our lives now will most likely be analyzed by historians much as how we are doing with peoples in Japan in the 19th and 20th centuries. Considering this, there is not much about myself being recorded that would be able to be analyzed by historians. I think this is not a problem due to the pandemic, rather societal shifts that have taken place in modern society. We as a society, have reduced the amount of personal writing we do (such as journals/diaries) and so there are not a lot of records of how ordinary people feel or live their lives. Considering my own life, if someone 100 years from now were to try to figure out my daily life and feelings they would not be able to because I have not written down or recorded my feelings or daily life. I think that this same situation can be also applied to most other people living in the modern era. As a historian, I enjoy reading and learning everything about other people’s daily lives so it would be hypocritical of me to be uncomfortable with the idea of future historians digging through my daily lives and relationships. Aside from that, I do not feel uncomfortable with the idea of historians digging through my life. In fact, it makes me feel almost at ease and comforted thinking that even long after my death people will be interested in my life and the story I have to tell. This class has changed the way I think about the ethics of writing other people’s histories. I had already believed that it is important to point out bias in my sources but I had not considered also pointed out the lack of sources. By acknowledging how little we actually know about these people’s lives we are writing about we can respectfully and ethically analyze what we do know about their lives.