Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (review)

Minamata, a fishing town transformed in the early twentieth century by the development of Nitchitsu—a major chemical company renamed Shin Nitchitsu after World War II—came to symbolize the evils of industrial pollution by the 1960s and 1970s. Scores of residents were killed or severely incapacitated due to mercury poisoning caused by eating fish tainted by the organic mercury dumped with Shin Nitchitsu's wastewater into Minamata Bay. The horrors at Chernobyl and Bhopal have focused environmentalists' concerns about industrial pollution elsewhere in recent years, but Timothy S. George's new book shows that Minamata has many meanings, including those central to the history of medicine.

George examines the responses to the mysterious new disease by the offending company, various government bureaucracies, determined medical researchers, fisherfolk whose livelihoods were destroyed, metropolitan (Tokyo) environmentalists and intellectuals, poets and photojournalists, and, most poignantly, determined disease victims, as a case study of "democracy" in postwar Japan. His conclusion is convincing—that democracy in Japan is an evolving organism, more evident in individuals' belief in the possibilities of using the system to obtain justice than in an institutional structure that favors the powerful and permits the continuation of hierarchical social stratification. George's excellent study, while focusing on Japan, raises important issues that transcend the Japanese case, however: What is a disease, and who defines it? What is the political process of assessing responsibility for a disease? Does responsibility for causing disease require restitution to the victims? Is there a "pain threshold" that must be superseded before the evils of doing nothing to prevent the disease outweigh the economic benefits?

The first cases of what was not yet identified as "Minamata disease" appeared in 1955, when some individuals—mostly in fishing families—displayed symptoms of neurological damage such as an inability to walk, hold objects, or see clearly. Family cats were observed doing crazy "dances" before dropping dead. One local physician and a public health official were concerned, and began studies. In the next few years, medical researchers at the national university branch in Kumamoto, the prefecture in which Minamata was located, began studies to identify the disease and find its source. But Shin Nitchitsu confused the public by asserting that the researchers' painstaking and methodical medical research suggested they were clueless, and that perhaps the poison was due to seasonal organic factors. Moreover, Tokyo-based researchers scoffed at research conducted at what they unjustly deemed a "hick" university. Laborers at the factory presented no united front with the fishing families. The fishing families' demands for compensation for their lost income led some of their neighbors to ostracize them. To show their "sympathy," in 1959 the company gave paltry noblesse oblige payments to afflicted families while admitting no responsibility. Under additional political pressure, Shin Nitchitsu made a show of building a water purification system that they knew was completely ineffective in removing mercury, which they continued to use until 1968. The disease was declared over by 1960, and the company and the Japanese government assured everyone that no new cases would appear.

But new cases did appear, and they popped up in areas beyond Minamata. The mercury was spreading to neighboring communities and to the next generation, as children were born to parents who had ingested tainted fish. The ill from all walks of life—and not just fisherfolk—now took center stage. George's tale of the next stages in the Minamata disease saga is very compelling; it is a story of heroic struggle by the ill themselves as well as their family members, joined by photojournalists in Japan and the famed American husband-and-wife team of Eugene and Aileen Smith, that was chronicled by poets and other writers. The struggle had many elements, including a democratic...