With the oil spill in SF Bay fresh in my mind and coupled with the environmental policy class I took in my final semester of university it's hard not to feel that acute, youthful rage about corporate greed, their circumvention or outright flaunting of the law and the victims it leaves in the wake. Not even fifty miles from my childhood doorstep it's dangerous to swim in any Central Valley river due to pesticide pollution, the former Hunter's Point naval station is so toxic it should be considered a Superfund site, fishers at the Berkeley Municipal Pier shouldn't eat more than three fish per month from their catch or risk mercury poisoning and the same goes for Delta sportsmen. That is, of course, just a handful and in California no less--the environmental, organic, hippy-dippy capital of the damn world!
When Oyama-sensei--an elementary school English teacher in Hita that I met at the solstice party--invited me to visit Minamata near the end of last year I jumped at the chance, but the trip fell through at the last minute. The call came again last week though, asking if I would come this Saturday and I immediately accepted, along with three other ALTs, Lindsey, Tom and Rachel, all in Hita.
By all accounts I can find Minamata is the third worst industrial accident in the world behind the Chernobyl and Bhopal incidents. I can only scarcely describe the feeling I had standing in such a place. All day long my stomach had a knot in it and my legs felt weak, my normally mirthful self only finding joy in tormenting young Tom on the ridiculous tassel in his winter knit cap. I also felt a bit scared, as if simply treading on this ground was going to kill me. I feel a subtle guilt about that now. In all, 3,000 people were affected with "Minamata Disease" (a misnomer, but we'll get to that in a bit) to the level that it has killed or crippled them, but as many as 20,000 have shown symptoms of it. These days the city is the picture of the normal Japanese coastal town...on the surface.
The Shiranui Sea looking north towards Kumamoto City.
In 1908 the Chisso Corporation came and set up a chemical factory in the middle of Minamata, then a tiny, poor fishing village. Having several coves and natural harbors it was ideal for Chisso to ship out their products through a private port and the town thrived off increased employment and taxes. Within twenty years the factory's waste effluent had devastated the Shiranui Sea's fishing industry, but compensation agreements were agreed upon twice. Nobody got killed for sure. In the postwar period, as Japan was rushing to rebuild, all sort of materials were needed for the effort and all sorts of environmental regulations were being bypassed to get there. In 1955 Chisso's Minamata plant began producing acetaldehyde, a chemical needed to synthesize acetic acid that can be used to produce a huge number of products from fertilizers to solvents to PVCs. Unfortunately, doing this released mercury. Lots of it. It's estimated 150 tons of the stuff was released in the factory's effluent during their acetaldehyde manufacturing days.
The Chisso factory and the city of Minamata behind it.
Mercury is one of the more insidious pollutants because it gets into every level of the food chain and lasts a very very long time if not taken care of properly. Minamata being a fishing village--by this time a city due to the influx of Chisso workers--fish are an important part of their diet even after the fisheries were shot to hell by the first wave of non-lethal (to humans) pollution. When the fish began to ingest this mercury the townspeople must have thought it was Christmas in April. Mercury attacks the brain first and foremost and though I'm not a doctor (except on TV) with fancy medi-lingo to sling around I think it's ample to say that it fucks shit up all up in there. The fish were flopping around mindlessly along the coast and people were down at the shore catching them by hand. Dinner was served.
The epicenter of Minamata Disease: the Chisso factory's drainage duct.
On April 21, 1956 a girl was taken to Chisso's factory hospital suffering from convulsions and slurred speech. Two days later her younger sister was also hospitalized and two of their family house cats were dead. This family lived next to the canal where Chisso's effluent pipe dumped into and eventually carried waste into Hyakken Harbor, the city's main public port. Chisso's doctors didn't know what the symptoms meant, calling it an "unknown disease" and alarms weren't really sounded until several other sufferers were found around the town. Victims were quarantined in case their ailment was contagious, but cases continued to spread while theories mounted about what the cause could be. Finally, after four months, researchers from Kumamoto University got on the case, but it took them nearly three years to discover that mercury poisoning was the cause. This whole time Chisso's plant continued to dump mercury into the water and more people got sick. In fact, it wasn't until the 1970s that Chisso finally stopped making acetaldehyde at the Minamata plant!
Here's where I get really mad and start to hate humanity.
By 1959 Chisso knew they were the cause of the illness. In fact, they'd done their own tests of the process used to make acetaldehyde on cats before the production began in 1956 and all the subjects died. Fishing hauls in the Shiranui Sea had declined by over 90%, a chunk of the town was now crippled entirely or partially, miscarriages were through the roof and children born live were deformed or catatonic. Taking advantage of the still somewhat poor citizens Chisso payed a pitiful sum of money to them as "sympathy money" and made them all sign a contract to never seek compensation again. When things got worse the citizens finally decided to sue Chisso in a national court where the judge took one look at the contract and invalidated it as a gross affront to basic morality and responsibility. Chisso hired an army of lawyers and scientists to try to dispute the cause of the sickness and held up the case in the courts for ten years! Ten YEARS! Meanwhile another company in Niigata used the same technique to produce acetaldehyde and poisoned another town, adding another thousand cases to the nation's victims of mercury poisoning.
Chisso lost in the end and has been paying out the nose to victims for decades now, but they still fight every claim to compensation that crosses their desk tooth and nail. To clean up the harbor where most of the 150-odd tons of mercury lay required over a decade of dredging the entire floor and depositing it in a landfill that has now been made into a park. There's a bit of an issue with that I learned. Of course Chisso paid for this operation, but the phrase "spare no expense" must not be in their lexicon because they did a piss poor job of making the landfill. It's estimated the retaining wall that holds the mercury goo and buried fish back will collapse around 2025. Why? Because it was made of fucking wood! Wood vs. seawater...who did they think was going to win that one? Again Chisso doesn't want to shell out to reinforce the wall with concrete that doesn't, you know, rot and that leaves the expensive operation in the hands of the prefecture or national government. Knowing Japan's bureaucracy it won't be resolved until the last second.
The place we spent most of our time yesterday is a vocational training, well, cafe started by the mother of a victim. Called "Hot House", it's located in the city's entertainment neighborhood and is mostly staffed and frequented by victims of Minamata Disease. I admit my role there yesterday wasn't very involved considering that my language skills only extend to clearly worded Japanese, but some conversation was had and much was learned. Most of the surviving victims of Minamata Disease (over two-thirds of the original victims have died) now live in the Tokyo area where care is more advanced and easily available. Chisso Corporation...well, nobody can say they don't have balls because they still operate the factory in Minamata. And they still cause trouble. Their pipes run suspended above houses and through neighborhoods bound for their private port and I was told these pipes often break or leak, spilling acids and other chemicals into people's houses. There are mixed feelings amongst the citizens on what to do with Chisso: some want to burn them down and run them out of town; others realize they're a vital economic keystone for the city, without which Minamata would virtually cease to exist; others forgive them for their crimes. I'm with the "lynch mob" crowd on this one, personally. Seeing the factory made me sick to my stomach.
The enduring message from Minamata is that we have a lot to learn as humans about what it is to make a prosperous society and live a good life. Do we really want to plow ahead at full steam and leave in our industrial wake a sea of wrecked lives? That's not only unfair to those not privileged enough to live upstream from the harmful effects of society, but just morally wrong any way you slice it. Of all the literature I read yesterday about the disaster this passage stood out to me the most:
"The Minimata disease incident is not simply the crime of one corporation. It was the historically inevitable result of what seemed the proper thing to do: the pursuit of convenience and wealth. Historically speaking, the Minamata disease sufferers were sacrificed to humanity's desires."
--Matt
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