The Feeling of "No Need" in Everyday Life
How many people wake up each day thinking, "I need to leave a record of my existence"? Almost no one. We get up, go to work, eat, sleep, and repeat. The urgency of preserving one's trace for the future doesn't even make it onto the list of daily priorities.
That is perfectly natural. People live in the present. Next week's schedule, next month's bills, the children's school events. Our gaze is always fixed on the near future. Whether any trace of us will remain a hundred years from now doesn't register at all.
This essay does not deny that feeling. Rather, it begins by carefully observing where it comes from. Why can't we see record-keeping as something that concerns us personally?
Objectivity Disconnected from the Self
When we hear that a traditional craft is endangered because its artisans are aging out, most of us feel it "should be preserved." When manuscripts and artifacts of a great historical figure are at risk of being scattered, we agree they "must be protected."
This reaction is natural and correct. But it conceals a subtle psychological structure. The judgment that "it should be preserved" is made from a purely objective standpoint. Losing a traditional craft is a loss for society. Losing a historical figure's records is a loss for history. No one disputes that.
The problem is that this "should be preserved" judgment is entirely disconnected from the question, "What about my own records?" Traditional crafts and historical figures are worth preserving because they are objectively "valuable." But what about oneself? No special skills, no historically significant achievements. Measured against the yardstick of objective "value," there seems to be no reason to preserve one's own records.
The conviction that "someone's records should be preserved" coexists without contradiction with the feeling that "my own records are unnecessary."
This disconnection is the fundamental structure that prevents stakeholder awareness from emerging. As long as we measure the value of records by "objective importance," the vast majority of people will place themselves outside the frame. And the quiet structure of delegation—"someone else will take care of it"—settles in.
The Divide Between Society and the Self
"Important historical documents destroyed in fire." "The last practitioner of a traditional art passes away." When we encounter such news, most of us feel a momentary pang of regret. But that feeling is overwritten within seconds by the next headline.
Cultural preservation and record-keeping as social issues are, for most people, filed under "important but not my concern." They sit in the same category as environmental problems, declining birth rates, and food crises. We understand they matter. But the understanding never converts into a question about what we ourselves should do today.
This divide does not stem from indifference. In fact, there is interest. But between interest and stakeholder awareness lies a deep chasm. Interest means "knowing about it." Stakeholder awareness means "feeling that nothing will change unless I act." The divide between society and the individual is the distance between these two states.
Compassion for an Unnamed Gravestone
Walking through an old cemetery, you sometimes come across gravestones whose names have become illegible. Worn by wind and rain, covered in moss, belonging to no one identifiable. And yet, some people stop and put their hands together in prayer.
This act contains a curious compassion. They don't know the name. They don't know the era. There is no blood relation. Nevertheless, respect is directed at the sheer fact that "someone once existed here."
Where does this compassion come from? A religious obligation? A social convention? Probably neither—something more fundamental. It is the imagination that "I, too, will become this someday." The name will disappear, the memory will vanish, and the very fact of having existed will be lost. That vague premonition of the future is the wellspring of compassion for unnamed gravestones.
In the moment of praying before an unnamed gravestone, the boundary between "someone else's concern" and "my own" dissolves.
Here lies the seed of stakeholder awareness. Not sympathy—"how sad"—but recognition: "I, too, could become this." The moment this recognition is born, preserving records ceases to be someone else's business.
The Range of Ancestor Veneration: The Neighbor's Ancestors, Society's Ancestors
Placing your hands together before the family Buddhist altar is, for many Japanese, a natural act. You remember your grandparents' death anniversaries and visit the grave during Obon and the equinox. Ancestor veneration functions as a "personal concern" within the smallest unit of family.
But what about the neighbor's ancestors? Almost no one knows the grandparents' names of someone who recently moved in next door. Even people living in the same neighborhood have virtually zero interest in other families' ancestors. The line of blood kinship defines the range of veneration.
But what happens when we raise our vantage point one level higher? Communal graves for those without next of kin—managed by local governments, with an annual joint memorial service—are everyone's ancestors and no one's ancestors. Almost no one brings personal emotion to these ceremonies.
Raise the vantage point further, and you arrive at the concept of "society's ancestors." The countless people who lived on this land a hundred years ago, who built the roads, tilled the fields, and raised children. Their names are not recorded, yet our present society rests upon their labors.
As we extend the range of ancestor veneration from blood to community, from community to society, the boundary between "my ancestors" and "society's ancestors" blurs. Within that ambiguity lies a new horizon for stakeholder awareness.
Making Social Issues Personal: The Inner Sensation
There are moments when a social issue becomes personal. Usually, this happens through direct experience. You don't truly grasp the problems in the healthcare system until you or a family member falls ill. The severity of the daycare shortage doesn't hit home until you have a child. The reality of eldercare only becomes apparent when you care for an aging parent.
This personalization occurs through experience, not knowledge. No matter how much data we are shown or how many news articles we read, information that does not pass through our own bodies never becomes "our own concern." This is a limitation of human cognition, not something to be blamed.
However, lived experience is not the only pathway to personalization. There is another: imagination. When we learn about one specific person's experience in detail—name, date, place, emotion—the heart that statistics could not move sometimes stirs. This is the role that records play.
War Dead Records and the Value of Ordinary People's Diaries
Records of war dead are records chosen by the state. Name, unit, date and place of death. These are preserved as official records and become objects of memorial. Their names survived because the state judged their deaths "worthy of recording."
On the other hand, there are diaries and letters left by ordinary soldiers and civilians. Honest feelings written under the shadow of censorship, love for family, anxiety about an uncertain tomorrow. These records convey the "inner life of an individual" that never appears in official documents.
Official records tell us "what happened." Personal records tell us "what it felt like at the time." For historical understanding, the two are complementary. Yet in terms of preservation priority, the former has been overwhelmingly favored.
The Filter of "Preservation Legitimacy"
The question to ask here is: who decides the "legitimacy" of preserving a record? When the state preserves records, a filter inevitably operates. What to keep and what to discard. Whose name to inscribe and whose to leave out.
This filter exists in every aspect of record preservation. Library collection policies, museum acquisition criteria, archival selection—everything passes through a filter. Since it is impossible to preserve infinite records with finite resources, the filter is unavoidable.
The problem is not the existence of the filter, but the invisibility of its criteria. What is deemed "worth preserving" and what is not? In most cases, these criteria are never explicitly stated. And records that fail to pass through the filter become indistinguishable from records that never existed.
How Universal Records Sharpen the Resolution of History
There are aspects of an era that official records alone cannot reveal. Consider, for example, the moment someone received a draft notice—the so-called "red paper" in wartime Japan. Official records note "on such-and-such date, a draft notice was issued to so-and-so," but what the recipient actually felt goes unrecorded.
Had that person kept a diary, a single line might survive: "The red paper came. My wife wept. I haven't told the children yet." That one line delivers a tactile sense of the era that official records cannot convey, reaching a reader a hundred years later.
Those who had the means to keep records and those who did not differ fundamentally in their potential contribution to history. Literacy rates, access to paper and writing tools, the temporal and psychological space to write. Those who lacked these conditions—the vast majority of ordinary citizens—remain absent from the historical record.
The more ordinary people's records are added, the higher the "resolution" of historical understanding becomes. If official records paint history in 100 pixels, ordinary people's diaries and letters raise it to 1,000, then 10,000 pixels. Details that were invisible become visible; voices that were inaudible become audible.
The resolution of history is proportional to the number of people who left records.
What the Presence or Absence of a Filter Changes
Those who had the means to leave records and those who did not. Those whose records passed the filter of "legitimacy" and those whose did not. This asymmetry produces the bias in history.
Records of the powerful survive. Records of the wealthy survive. Records of the literate survive. But the records of the vast majority who were none of these do not. The people whose names endure in history are those who were blessed with the means and opportunity to keep records—which does not necessarily mean their lives were more important than anyone else's.
So does it make sense to preserve everyone's records without a filter? The answer is unequivocal: yes. Because it is impossible to know at the time of recording which records will prove valuable a hundred or a thousand years later.
A single farmer's diary might become evidence of regional climate change. A single mother's letter might become the only document revealing the realities of child-rearing in a particular era. The value of a record is determined not at the time it is made, but at the time it is read.
Judging the value of a record in advance is, in principle, impossible. That is precisely why filter-free record preservation has meaning.
TokiStorage's mission of "democratizing proof of existence" is rooted in this philosophy. It does not pre-select whose records are valuable. Three-layer distributed preservation—physical inscription on quartz glass, deposit with the National Diet Library, and digital publication on GitHub Pages—is a design that preserves everyone's records for a millennium without intermediary filters.
Returning to Modern Everyday Life
We have taken a long detour through unnamed gravestones, ancestor veneration, and wartime records. Now, let us pose the question again: should we feel a "need" to preserve records in our daily lives?
There is no need to rush the answer. Stakeholder awareness cannot be forced. Being told from outside that "your records matter" does not, by itself, make it personal.
But a shift in perspective can be offered. The possibility that your records exist not only for yourself, but for someone in the future. That a hundred years from now, someone who has never seen your face or heard your name might read your words and think, "So that is what that era was like."
Just as someone prays before an unnamed gravestone, someone a hundred years from now may read your record. Whether that record exists or not changes the resolution of history. Whether to add one person's worth of resolution is a decision only you—the stakeholder—can make.
The final answer to the question "necessary or not?" can only be found within yourself. What this essay has attempted is not to let that question pass by as someone else's concern, but to offer an occasion to pause and confront it as your own.
Stakeholder awareness cannot be compelled. But a question can be offered. Is your existence worth recording?
References
- Kunio Yanagita, About Our Ancestors (1946)—A pioneering work on Japanese views of ancestry and the scope of veneration.
- Daikichi Irokawa, The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan (1975)—A methodology for writing history from the perspective of ordinary citizens.
- Japan Memorial Society for the Students of the Second World War, ed., Listen to the Voices from the Sea (1949)—Collected writings of fallen student soldiers, conveying the texture of the era through individual records.
- Shunsuke Tsurumi, An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945 (1982)—Reconstructing the mental life of ordinary people from historical records.
- Michifumi Isoda, A Samurai's Account Book (2003)—An exemplary approach to reading history through the everyday records of common people.