In some ways, the way I relate most to Mikiso Hane is through Knox. We are all connected through this institution and the drive for continual learning. This changes the way that I would approach his collection because even though I never knew him, I know of him as a professor and so I am super interested in his teaching documents like lesson plans or stories about the way that he taught. Another way that I relate to Hane is through the war, while I obviously was not alive, I have family on my mother’s side that fought in it and I have family on my father’s side that was affected by partition.
Something we should keep in mind about Hane’s position is that while he was a valuable resource and professor to Knox, among other institutions, he was a person with a story. From the box that I was combing through, there didn’t seem to be much that was super personal, but if there is there should be a lot of discretion that’s taken when deciding to keep it. From the reading that we did before that session in the archives, one of the takeaways that I got was that a collection should accurately represent the personality of a person or group that you are preserving. Thus, if there was anything personal, like his thoughts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I would be hesitant to keep those because he didn’t share that information publicly often.
Another thing that should be kept in mind is what research questions might be asked and what of the documents (specifically the books) can be found elsewhere. I wonder how much it is relevant to maintain a collection of notes he took in Japanese (or Chinese?) on documents in those languages, one because most people at Knox can’t speak those languages, and two, those thoughts were probably expanded upon in either a book, paper, or lesson, which are probably more accessible to a wider audience for a couple of reasons. Accessibility of the documents is important to consider as well, because even though they might be really cool to keep in the collection, if they are really only accessible to a select group of people because of language or legibility of handwriting, it’s a more complicated decision to make.
These are great things to consider when thinking of Hane’s legacy. In particular that problem of the “personal” material in an otherwise professional archive. As a historian, my default is to save even the inconvenient or unflattering materials because as a scholar, I would want to know that they existed. But that’s not the same set of ethics as archivists are dealing with. Maybe the tactic we’re using with student papers–restricting access but keeping it a part of a collection–is a way to satisfy both.