Empathy, Ethics, and Mikiso Hane – Nathan Brooks

I suppose I relate to Mikiso Hane in regard to my area of historical interest. Although I do not have an interest in Japanese history, I do enjoy learning about historical individuals from underprivileged backgrounds. I find the aspects of everyday life in history to be very fascinating. Additionally, learning about those types of individuals helps to understand what was truly going on behind the scenes of any given government, without having to decipher any propaganda.

In terms of position, I think it is important to consider Mikiso Hane as the respected academic that he was. This is important for various reasons, however, one sticks out to me as especially important: it gives his documents a level of authority. Thus, no matter what people in the future are researching (Japan, Knox history, history of education) they can rest assured that Hane’s work is of the highest quality and reliability. On a similar note, we need to be cautious about appraising the items in the box, as they could have a variety of uses that may not seem obvious. For example, in my box, there were multiple copies of the same assignment instructions. While we may not need to keep every single one, it is important to have them, as they could be used for researching the history of education, or even how history was taught for relatively recent events (like how one of my documents was discussing the history of the cold war in the 1970s).