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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.2 (2003) 461-463



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Oiwa Keibo. Rowing the Eternal Sea: The Story of a Minamata Fisherman. Narrated by Ogata Masato. Translated by Karen Colligan-Taylor. Asian Voices. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. x + 195 pp. Ill. $65.00 (cloth, 0-7425-0020-9), $24.95 (paperbound, 0-7425-0021-7).

This moving autobiography is not, on the surface, a book about public health. Ogata Masato, born in 1953, is a fisherman who suffers from Minamata disease. His nerve and brain cells were attacked by methyl mercury discharged into the sea from 1932 to 1968 by the Chisso chemical plant in Minamata, Japan. The mercury was concentrated in the food chain and consumed in fish and shellfish by tens of thousands of people around Minamata.

The strength and vision of Ogata take his story far beyond the usual presentation of Minamata disease as the ultimate symbol both of the dark side of postwar Japan's high growth and of the rise of its citizens' movement. (For an overview, [End Page 461] see this reviewer's Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan, 2001.) Ogata's story is a moving example of an individual's struggle to avoid being defined and absorbed by a corporate, governmental, and medical "System" designed to certify, compensate, and control victims.

One thread of the story is the destruction of the connectedness of members of traditional fishing communities to each other and to the natural environment when "the System, capitalism and modernization, came upon them" (p. 179). It did so horrifically: in 1959 Ogata's father's hands went numb. He stumbled, mumbled, and could hardly swallow the soup cooked by his wife in the dirt-floored hospital kitchen where relatives cooked for patients. His death confirmed the spread of Minamata disease beyond Minamata Bay, where it had first been reported in 1956. Ogata, teased because of his father's death from the "strange disease," suffered dizzy spells and numbness. Ten family members were eventually certified as patients, under a system that began with "sympathy payments" from the company under a 1959 agreement and was expanded after patients sued and Chisso was found legally responsible in 1973.

The book's second theme is that society as a whole was to blame—not just the company that poisoned Ogata, the government that allowed this, and the neighbors who ostracized him. Ogata joined the victims' movement and became a leader of the patients awaiting certification, but eventually realized that "we could not fight the system unless we were in it" (p. 93). He left the movement, and in 1985 he withdrew his application for certification, still pending after eleven years. He enjoyed the officials' surprise and confusion: "I was no longer a member of the movement but Ogata Masato; they were no longer officials but human beings" (p. 104).

Since then Ogata has demonstrated how a pollution victim can define himself by rejecting the "System" in favor of alternative forms of interconnectedness. He built a wooden boat named Tokoyo, the Buddhist "Other World." He rowed and sailed it to Minamata daily, sitting in front of the factory and displaying "open letters" with a simple, direct message: "The Minamata Incident began when people stopped seeing their fellow humans as human beings" (p. 111), and it was time for them to reconnect. Ogata also visited Auschwitz and Okinawa to put Minamata in the context of other tragedies of the twentieth century. A symbolic focus of his activity is the new land created by dredging the mercury-laden sludge and confining it in the innermost part of Minamata Bay. Ogata has worked to make this "a place of atonement" and even "a place to contemplate my own guilt and to offer my own apology" (p. 121), and has written about "the Chisso within" himself and all of us (p. 143). He has placed small Buddhist stone statues there, silent witnesses meant to "serve as our guides, leading us on a path of healing and restoration" (p...

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