TOKYO - Seventy years have passed since Minamata disease was officially confirmed.
The title of the first report, dated May 4, 1956, from the Minamata Public Health Center in Kumamoto Prefecture to the prefectural health director, was "On a strange pediatric illness occurring near the Tsukinoura district of Minamata." People who developed the disease while inside their mothers' wombs are now around 70 years old and struggling to live. But there has been no systematic and sustained study of the victims in this generation, making an urgent investigation to clarify what happened essential.
To consider that the core of the case remains underwater, let's look at the lives of two physicians.
Hajime Hosokawa (1901-1970), a medical graduate of the old Tokyo Imperial University, became director of a hospital attached to the Minamata plant of Nippon Chisso Hiryo K.K., a predecessor of Chisso Corp., in 1947. On May 1, 1956, after examining two young sisters, he reported to the center that "a central nervous system disease is occurring frequently with the cause being unknown," a notification regarded as marking official confirmation of the existence of what came to be known as Minamata disease.
Hosokawa conducted a series of experiments in which he directly administered wastewater from the acetaldehyde production process to cats and in October 1959, he confirmed symptoms of the disease in the 400th cat. Acetaldehyde, a plastic feedstock, was the company's cash cow at the time. The process generated organic mercury as a byproduct. In clinical questioning in the first Minamata disease lawsuit, which was filed in 1969 with the Kumamoto District Court, Hosokawa testified, "When I reported the (disease's) onset (in Cat No. 400) to the company, I was told to stop the experiment." He died about three months later.
Hosokawa, who became the discoverer, the investigator of the cause and a whistleblower against the company, wrote, "In pollution, prevention is a far more important task than relief." For a long time, those on the side that caused the harm failed to learn from the anguished words of a corporate physician on the front line.
Masazumi Harada (1934-2012), a medical graduate of Kumamoto University, remained involved with Minamata disease for more than 50 years, leaving behind many books and phrases such as "the responsibility of those who have seen it." "Minamata disease did not create discrimination; Minamata disease occurred where discrimination already existed," he said, words rooted in lived reality.
In 2012, I interviewed Harada at his home in Kumamoto, which, in retrospect, became his last interview. What weighed on him to the end was the issue of fetal Minamata disease.
Harada's true value was flexible field-based practice. He was the first in the world to systematically compile an academic paper on fetal Minamata disease and won an award, then later published a reprint edition in which he himself pointed out three errors -- limiting the period of occurrence, limiting symptoms to cerebral palsy and failing to continue the survey.
Returning to fetal Minamata disease, the starting point of the case history, the investigation of the "strange pediatric illness" that led to confirmation of Minamata disease eventually shifted its focus to strange illnesses in adults and research also shifted toward pursuing the causative substance.
How many people were affected by fetal Minamata disease and what symptoms did they have? Fetal Minamata disease, unprecedented in the world, remains unexplained, yet clues barely still exist. There is a notebook in which Harada personally recorded the names of about 70 people and a thesis that highlights large numbers of stillbirths and miscarriages in the Minamata-Ashikita area and compares junior high school students in polluted areas with those in unpolluted areas in 1970. It's not too late yet.
But in 2004, when the Supreme Court for the first time finalized the responsibility of the state and Kumamoto Prefecture, the central government flatly rejected a proposal by the prefecture for a survey on 470,000 people along the coast of the Shiranui Sea, or also known as the Yatsushiro Sea.
The "health survey" stipulated in the 2009 special measures law on Minamata disease has also been pursued in a direction opposite to what victims sought, as if fearing the opening of a Pandora's box. Being on the ground, I have come to feel these 70 years were marked not only by omissions -- the failure of those responsible to do what should have been done -- but also by a lack of the small courage needed to face forward.
Over the past month, there were various statements, including some from the Environment Ministry, but in the end nothing moved. There is a Minamata that does not change.
(Takashi Takamine, born in 1952, is a former chief editorial writer at the Kumamoto Nichinichi Shimbun daily. He serves as visiting professor at Kumamoto Gakuen University and has written books on Minamata disease and other social topics.)
