Ethical Recording of History
The stories of the baraku, Okinawan, and Korean women showed the hardships they faced in their lives. While the readings gave us valuable information about how these groups struggled, they also left us with many questions. The lack of information about the topics makes it difficult to accurately depict their lives.
This leaves us in quite a dilemma. How can we go about to accurately and ethically tell the story of people of whom we know so little about. We only know bits and pieces of information that these people have left behind, and the majority of documentation of their lives is lost. While this may be beneficial to understanding their lives overall, and we can extrapolate some information to gain deeper insight, this does not allow us to understand the specific circumstances of their lives that makes them a person rather than a statistic. This can be seen with the story about the Okinawan woman, Iha Yoneko. From family ledgers we found that she worked long hours and who was in her family, but we can’t determine what her aspiration and hobbies were. While using the lacking information about these groups is subpar, it still is worthwhile to use it to describe their history. While the documentation leaves much out, it begins a dialogue. I think it’s ethical to not erase these groups from history just because there is a lack of information. As long as it begins a productive conversation and we can learn from it, this lacking information is enough.
During the pandemic, I have not kept any records. The only documentation of my life would be my grades and assignments. I am not very active on social media, so much of my life would be lost. Even now, without accessing my text message history, the records of my life would look very similar to the records of these women. In the future, if historians would look at this time, I believe I would lost among the masses. My internal feelings, my outlook on life, my goals would not be recorded. I have never really thought about how my life would be perceived in the future before. This class has shown me that the ethical readings of history is very important. How we portray people can change dramatically based on how these records are interpreted.
