. . . Reprinted with permission from
      JAPAN TIMES
      (Toyko, Japan)
      Aug. 12-18, 1991, pp. 1+

MINAMATA: SEASIDE TOWN STILL HAUNTED BY DISASTER
by Drew Poulin
Staff Writer

     The old Minamata fisherman cradles his stricken grandchild in his arms as he laments the ravaging by industrial poisoning of three generations of his family. Suddenly, his body convulses in the "mad dancing" that is all too familiar to the residents of this pretty seaside town.

     Violent muscular spasms jerk him about, then he falls screaming with fists clenched, arms drawn tightly to his chest. Moments pass. The pain subsides. He settles to the floor, exhausted. But the demon isn't finished with him yet. The left hand again curls tremulously toward his chest, until it is grasped and held in check by the right.

     Scenes like this one--from a one-man play staged by actor-environmentalist Akira Sunada--are still played out in real life by some residents of Minamata, the southern Kyushu town that in the 1950s and 1960s awakened the world to the horrific consequences of unrestrained industrialization.

     But pain and broken lives are only one part of the Minamata story. Corporate ruthlessness and deception, biased medical research, ignorance, shame and--according to the thousands now pursuing relief through the courts--government negligence and stonewalling also play central roles. And even as the agency created to prevent such tragedies from recurring marks its 20th anniversary, even as Japan casts itself as an environmental leader among nations, the horror story of Minamata continues to unfold.

     It began in 1956, when the 5-year-old daughter of a fisherman was taken to the hospital of Chisso Corp., a chemical company and the town's main employer.

     The company doctor, Hajime Hosokawa, was baffled by her symptoms, which included delirium, difficulty in walking and speaking, and other signs of brain damage. After the girl's sister and several of her neighbors were struck down with a similar condition, Hosokawa announced that a disease of the central nervous system had broken out in the town.

     Animals in the area had been behaving strangely for several years. Cats had run amok and jumped into the sea. Birds had dropped from the sky. Worst of all for the fishermen and their families, increasing numbers of dead fish had been found floating in the Shiranui Sea, the island-studded inland body on which Minamata is situated.

     The fish catch in the area had been declining for decades, and the cause had been acknowledged since 1925. That's when Chisso--which had been dumping chemicals into Minamata Bay since its founding in 1907--agreed to compensate the fishermen for their losses.

     But the spring of 1956 was the first time an unusual malady had been noted in humans. The idea that a toxic agent could be passed back to people through the food chain was still unfamiliar, and Chisso was not immediately suspect. Doctors began suggesting various known illnesses, such as polio and encephalitis, as the cause. Finally, after finding that the new affliction matched none of those known, they settled on calling it "a strange disease."

     Movie footage taken of the first victims by medical researchers from nearby Kumamoto University is painful to watch. People who only days earlier had appeared healthy are shown thrashing and convulsing uncontrollably, unable even to feed themselves. Those who were no longer able to stand up lie in their beds unable to speak, their gaunt faces stretched into masks of pain and fear. Perhaps fortunately, the disease progressed rapidly, and many of the victims died within a few months of its onset. Autopsies consistently revealed those parts of the brain responsible for thought, speech, movement and balance to be spongy and riddled with holes.

     By August 1956, Chisso--the only industrial plant in the area--was the prime suspect, and it fought efforts to confirm its guilt. A researcher from the university, after having been denied access to the company's grounds, climbed a fence to collect mud samples for testing. He was detained by a security guard and his samples were confiscated. Chisso continued to prevent scientists from obtaining waste-water samples until 1962, when an old bottle of sludge from outside the plant was discovered in a laboratory at the university.

     In November 1959, a research team from the university, commissioned by the Health and Welfare Ministry, concluded that the culprit was organic mercury discharged by Chisso. The team was immediately dismissed and its findings muted. Evidence uncovered by Chisso's Hosokawa that cats given water from the plant contracted the disease were never made public. Chisso then allegedly assembled its own scientists to refute incriminating evidence.

     "Today it's hard to imagine such abuses of science," says lawyer Takanori Goto, who since 1970 has helped Minamata victims fight for compensation. "One scientist even said Imperial Army bombs dropped into the bay during World War II may have caused the disease."

     Chisso had reason to worry. Ignoring warnings from scientists, the company had earlier diverted its discharge from Minamata Bay to the nearby Minamata River. The river spread the poisons even further into the Shiranui  Sea, and soon new cases of the disease began appearing up and down the coast.

     The following year, after angry fishermen stormed the Chisso plant to demand an end to the dumping, the company installed a "cyclator," a device it claimed would filter dangerous chemicals from the effluent. In truth, the cyclator--built under the guidance of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry--was merely a sedimentation tank that removed only the mercury's color and smell but not its toxicity. Researchers testified in court that the technology did not yet exist to purify water of organic mercury. A glass of water that Chisso's president drank in a display for the media, and which he claimed was taken from the purifier, was later found to have been tap water. By 1964, it had come to light that some waste water was being discharged without passing through the cyclator.

     Victims now say that the government had, at that point, already turned a blind eye to the tragedy. "The association of ministries established to take care of the problem knew that the water wasn't going through the cyclator," says Satoru Saishu, a Tokyo University researcher and long-standing critic of the government's policy. "The government knew."

     Tokyo never did move to stop the poisoning. Chisso continued to dump mercury until 1966, when it began using a closed drainage system. By the time the government acknowledged the cause of the disease in 1968, the company had abandoned--as obsolete--the production methods that produced the mercury.

     "The government did nothing," says Kumamoto University Professor Masazumi Harada, a doctor who participated in the first Minamata research. "It could have shut down the plant or prohibited the fishermen from catching and eating the fish, but it said no evidence existed" that linked Chisso with the disease.

     The government, however, says it was powerless. "At that time there was no concept of environmental pollution and no system of regulation," says Akinori Ogawa, an official with the Environment Agency's Office of Specified Diseases. Ogawa says that whether the government could have invoked the Food Sanitation Act or the Fishery Resources Protection Act to stop the discharge, as critics such as Harada contend, is "a matter for legal discussion."

     Holding the government accountable is one motive of the some 2,200 people whose suits are now before courts around the country. All the actions are based on a 1973 ruling that ordered Chisso and Kumamoto Prefecture to compensate the mercury victims. In a series of decisions that began last September, six courts recommended that the Environment Agency sit down with the plaintiffs to negotiate out-of-court settlements. In their rulings, the judges said that such negotiations are necessary to avoid a grueling appeals process that could outlast the plaintiffs, many of whom are elderly. But the government has refused, maintaining that the courts must first decide the thorny issue of designating victims, which it insists is a medical problem.

     The designation question was brought to the courts because claimants who had been rejected had charged that the committee assigned to decide who are victims--and who aren't--uses criteria that are far too strict. The committee, a panel of physicians from various specialties selected by the Kumamoto Prefectural Government "requires, in essence, that the victim be crippled," says lawyer Goto. Under a 1970 law passed to aid pollution victims, he adds, they are entitled to compensation "if affected."

    Of the some 17,000 people who filed compensation claims, 10,000 were rejected. Just over 2,000 victims have received settlements, which include a lump-sum payment of between Y16 million ($116,800) and Y18 million ($131,400), depending on how seriously they had been affected, and monthly payments of about Y100,000 ($730). The claims of the other 5,000 are pending.

     Compared with the symptoms of the early Minamata victims, those of the people now claiming compensation are mild, says Harada, who served on the Kumamoto designation committee for five years before quitting in frustration. Yet even in these chronic patients, there are symptoms of mercury poisoning, he says. These include muscular spasms and weakness, numbness in the legs and arms, narrowing of the visual field, ringing in the ears and mental retardation.

     The designation committee's decisions often seem arbitrary, Harada says. He points to cases in which one member of a family was rejected for compensation while another was approved. "In one fisherman's house, the grandmother, grandfather and wife were recognized, but not the husband," he says.

     The government, however, maintains that diagnosing chronic mercury poisoning is not always clear-cut. "It's not so simple," says Ogawa. "The symptoms of chronic mercury poisoning cannot be distinguished from those of aging." And there are good reasons why relatives might be treated differently, he adds. "According to some studies, the amount (of mercury) taken in by members of the same family differed. People's resistance to mercury also varies greatly."

     "It is very difficult to diagnose," admits Harada. "In some it's present only as mental retardation. But the incidence of mental retardation is much higher among young people from the area" around the Shiranui Sea than in other parts of Japan. Determining victims "is not a medical problem," he says. "It's a political problem."

     And it's a problem Harada thinks will grow enormously if all those affected are recognized. Because there were 200,000 people working at fishing-related jobs in the area at the time of the worst dumping,"I think about 10,000 may have been affected" over the years, he says. "I call it a slow version of the atomic bomb."

     Concern over the ultimate extent of the poisoning is the main reason the government is taking pains to avoid responsibility, says Goto. "It's afraid to see the truth because it would have to acknowledge so many victims," he says. But despite the government's refusal to enter compensation negotiations, he says, it is already compensating victims indirectly by providing Chisso with money laundered through the Kumamoto government in the form of loans to the company. "If you do the arithmetic, you'll see that Chisso had to have gone broke long ago" from the compensation payments, he says.

     The government admits it is subsidizing Chisso's payments. But Minamata is a "very exceptional" case, says Ogawa. "If we were responsible then we would pay compensation directly. But the government didn't discharge anything, so why should we be required to pay compensation?" The indirect payments are necessary, however, because "the government is required to ensure the people's welfare." Ogawa himself seems uncomfortable with this reasoning. "It's difficult to explain logically," he says.

     The Environment Agency, formed in July 1971, when Minamata publicity was at its height, is being made to answer for those ministries that critics say ignored the people's welfare throughout the affair. The toll this has taken on the agency became tragically apparent last December, when Toyonori Yamanouchi, then in charge of the agency's Minamata section, committed suicide. Agency officials were reported as saying that Yamanouchi had felt trapped between the government and the victims.

     Today, the city of Minamata is trying to transform itself into a monument to environmentalism. Minamata Bay has been reclaimed, its 50 hectares of toxic sludge buried under dirt gouged from the islands across the Shiranui Sea, which now have fresh brown scars in their green hillsides. The reclaimed land was to have been the site of an ecological park. But the ground won't stop shifting, and nothing has been built there.

     "This..is..the..final..war!" bellows Akira Sunada, closing his play with an impassioned plea for help in the fight against pollution. The fishermen of Minamata, the first casualties of that war, know what can be lost.

     Yoshiharu Tanoue wasn't going to lay down and die.

     But Tanoue, a fisherman and one of the first victims of Minamata disease, wasn't given much of a chance. Most of the other fishermen in the area who had the same symptoms-- convulsions, numbing of the limbs, poor vision--had seen their health slowly deteriorate, and many had died. But Tanoue decided he would try to heal himself.

     Using the compensation he was awarded for his illness, he bought a mountain outside Minamata. He donated part of the land to a victims' support group to build a memorial and a small museum. On the rest, he started farming.

     "I knew the doctors couldn't help me, so I though I would try to rehabilitate myself," he says. "I wanted to eat only food I grew myself."

     Something worked. Today the wiry Tanoue, 60, scrambles up the muddy mountain slopes on his farm as nimbly as any young man. He and his wife coax sweet potatoes, Italian rye and corn and other vegetables from the rich mountain soil, raise livestock and trap wild boars that wander only the farm.

     He is by no means cured, however. The numbness and vision problems remain, and occasionally his muscles cramp so badly that he must be massaged. But Tanoue certainly doesn't look like a victim of one of the world's worst environmental disasters.--D.P.