The old mansion was burned down here last year. It is said that the paintings and calligraphic works exceeding 100 containing unpublished Ryokan's writing have burned out in that case. A thing will fall into ruin in ancient times, if it is silent. (However it may have managed on the principle of obsoleting by time and history, and the essential target carefully, it will change to them qualitatively by bacteria, a microbe, a chemical reaction, etc.) Now, it which should be called the principle of obsoleting cannot prevent it to us in natural providence at all for the time being.However, the digitization which is the technology of a computer in recent years gives power to the present nearly perfect copy and prevention of obsoleting even about those cultural properties. It is from the middle of the level of 40 years old that I began to inquire with interest to the Gautama Buddha mound, and it was not interested in the Gautama Buddha mound at all till then.It is important to digitize data for the Asano whole family who may lean interest --- since age is piled up even if like me.Since what naturally digitized is not a genuine article at all, there is no curio-value it is often worthy in a world. There are completely they only at the individual value for scientific value and the whole family. Therefore, if the technology of my computer is helpful was thought, and research is continued as long as time continues to allow. CD-ROM and a homepage are continuing announcing a part of the result.
Many photographs and reference revive by digital processing. Moreover, prolonged preservation becomes possible in few spaces.
Nakayama on the other day -- when photograph data are digitized, I come to understand in the performance scenery of 
The Photo that Miss Hisa Nakayama (the seventh daughter of Asano xiii) was playing koto (a long Japanese zither with thirteen strings) to the character of the folding screen which is back (Refer to photograph)I think many data kept carefully until now not only look back upon the past for the whole family of the Asano family, but that become pride and the symbolic thing which stimulates union with future in the past.Whenever it thinks so, I think " immediately now ". If there is a principle of obsoleting at all for present me, progress of time has a feeling of impatience, so that it thinks that it is even as an enemy.Because, I know well myself who are the power of digitization, and the member of the Asano family.If it is not digitized even if recorded on a photograph, a negative film, videotape, or the audio cassette, it is only for the object of the principle of obsoleting by the history and time like the point too. We cannot necessarily be interested only in purport of a letter or the contents. I think that history and culture will be paddle felt [ of letters ]. In the meaning, it is isolable from the bad influence of obsoleting, and even if digitization of those existing data considers portablity, it thinks that an effect is the method of the greatest and only.
Moreover, although there are quite a few technical elements about digitization, in the technical side, I cover completely in the fortunate thing. Still more, the whole family of the Asano family has many reference.In order that teens Kichiroemon Asano n may aspire after Western medicine in the end of a Edo period, He went to Nagasaki and has taken one photograph there.In the 65mm long and about 50mm wide size, the preservation state is restored for it by digital processing like the left at last, although the original edition was the worst. Moreover, the whole family's good photograph also has Mr. Motomu Wada of the Gautama Buddha mound graduate also after Meiji by the favor studied in Nagasaki in photography. connection of the history of the Asano family also with long my having also become the technician of the computer which is present-day photography -- I feels.About Saburo Asano who is the father who died six months after I was born, I do not know at all. There is no means to know. Then, since there was Saburo's diary, I thought that it would digitize by reading it. However, the principle of obsoleting was acting even in this diary. That is, the portion written with many fountain pens is the badness of the quality of ink of those days, and had disappeared. Efforts to leave Saburo Asano, a father, to data are still sometimes accompanied by pain mentally. From now on, I will regard the data [ be / just like that of a genuine article / in the virtual world / it ] carefully kept over hundreds of years as the effective reasonable means which we have now for the Asano whole family's posterity or the researcher being digitization.
Ryoukan
Ryokan(1758-1831) was as noble a Japanese bonze as ever lived. He didn't belong to any Buddhist temple. Neither did he preach nor propagate. He obeyed Buddha faithfully and gave up his all, going about asking for alms, doing "zazen"; sitting still like a stone with his mind in nothingness. He lived out his lonely life in a deserted, thatched cottage called Gogoan in the snowy country, Echigo, which is far from Edo(Tokyo). Japan of his days was characterized by famines, bribes, foreign warships compelling Japan to trade with them.