The Attic Archive and Days of Never-Ending Clutter
In the field where I work, there is a person named Uno (a pseudonym) who has been active for a long time.
I have worked with him for 25 years.
Wherever Uno goes, mountains form.
They are not sand dunes or dioramas.
They are mountains of documents.
When we moved offices over 20 years ago, I packed up the mountains of documents that were on Uno's desk.
Uno's desk (right), desk (center), desk (left), desk (back right), desk (back left).
We ended up with about 10 boxes like that.
We opened about half of them after the move, but the remaining five boxes stayed as they were.
Since then, the office has moved about four times.
With the remaining five boxes still unopened, we packed up the mountains of documents from the next office, and the number of boxes continued to grow.
About 10 years ago, we ran out of space for boxes in the office, so we built an extra room in the attic of our two-story wooden office building. We carried a massive number of boxes up there.
The first floor of the office became Uno's home space, the second floor became the office, and the third-floor attic became the document warehouse.
As staff, we would look up at the ceiling every day and say,
"If an earthquake hits, it feels like we're going to be crushed to death by the mountains of documents."
Uno didn't care at all and kept on building mountains.
Uno's study desk on the first floor, his dining table, and his desk in the second-floor office were all gradually buried in mountains.
Only enough space for one laptop remained on the dining table.
He would work on that PC, close the lid when finished, lay down a napkin, and set out his plates. What does he plan to do if he spills miso soup?
Since all his desks were buried, Uno started keeping documents permanently on the meeting table in the second-floor office, and he began holding remote meetings there as well.
So that Uno could spend as much time as he wanted with his mountains of documents, I set up a second office and moved there with the staff.
I go to Uno's office once a week for meetings.
But the meeting table is buried, so it's not comfortable and I leave quickly.
Uno seems dissatisfied.
When that two-base lifestyle had continued for nearly two years, Uno said he was going to organize the office.
He said that because there are many valuable documents, he wants to hire part-time workers and spend two to three years organizing them.
The line "I want to organize" was something he also said on the day I first met him 25 years ago.
He also asked me to organize them when I went there as a volunteer.
Over the next 20 years or so, I digitized almost all of the valuable documents.
Not just paper documents, but posters, videos, photos, and audio as well.
The documents spanned nearly 80 years, starting from right after the war.
Using donations, grants, and government subsidies, we created a massive archive, and some of it was made public on the internet.
Uno is welcome to cherish the paper documents as his treasures, but it is difficult to keep paying rent to store them.
But Mr. Uno kept insisting.
"But there are so many important documents. I want to build a museum."
I asked gently.
"What kind of documents do you still have on hand?"
Mr. Uno thought for a moment before speaking.
"No... they aren't really things worth digitizing."
"Then, are they things you want to put on display?" I asked.
"It's not really that either..."
After a brief pause, Mr. Uno continued.
"I just can't tell the difference between what should be kept and what shouldn't."
I see.
I quietly calculated the budget for the three-year attic museum plan
in my mind.
The story of how I ended up with two offices and then two homes is here.
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"Before I knew it, I had two houses"
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