Self-documentation + persistence = art and/or primary source for historians

I once tutored a high school kid who wanted to install a video camera on his hat and film his every waking moment. He wondered at what point would he have to stop filming and start watching.

A display at Incheon’s “moon village” museum showcased the collected diaries of one resident who had unfailingly pasted in his ticket stub from the weekend matinee and wrote notes for each film. Accumulated and presented years later, his diaries were the best kind of time capsule.

I just reread Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things and was struck by how the interviewee above, like many people, is attached to seemingly useless junk as a way of external memory storage. Her collection of movie theater soda cups is her memory of films shared and seen with her husband. The fear of forgetting or erasure is powerful, imbuing even the most insignificant scraps of paper with meaning. (Don’t ask me about my cardboard boxes full of college lecture notes!) 

Hawaii friends say that hoarding tendencies are amplified here by memories of the 3-month-long shipping strike in the 1970s and general ambient Asian/local Japanese thriftiness (see Kam Swap Meet and the popularity of church rummage sales).