Episode 35: Minamata: The Victims and the World & Minamata (Guest: Darryl Flaherty)

This episode looks at two films that examine the environmental disaster in Minamata, Japan: Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s documentary, Minamata: The Victims and the World (1971), and Andre Levitas’s Minamata (2020), a Hollywood feature film that tells the story through the famous American photographer, W. Eugene Smith. From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso Corporation, a local petrochemical and plastics maker, dumped approximately 27 tons of mercury into Minamata bay, poisoning fish and, ultimately, the people who ate them. Several thousand people died and many more suffered crippling injuries, with often severe mental and physical effects. The corporation’s environmental pollution sparked legal and political battles that would last decades and reverberate throughout Japan. Guest: Darryl Flaherty Darryl Flaherty is a historian of law and social change in early modern and modern Japan. He is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware where he teaches courses on Japanese, Asian, and world history. Professor Flaherty has published work on the emergence of Japan's legal profession during the nineteenth century, the Meiji Restoration in world history, and the twentieth century history of the jury in Japan. Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction2:13 The Chisso Chemical Corporation4:58 The fishing life in Minamata7:30 Methylmercury poisoning12:20 Movement politics and environmental protest in Japan16:44 The debilitating Minamata disease18:59 The Minamata pollution litigation22:03 Denial and violence by the Chisso Corporation 24:08 Government complicity29:26 Discrimination against the victims30:51 Strategies and challenges in obtaining compensation38:28 Noriaki Tsuchimoto, W. Eugene Smith, and the notoriety of Minamata44:51 The importance of an apology48:30 Environmental reform and its limits in Japan52:14 A lens into the 2011 Fukushima disaster54:39 The limited role of lawyers in the films57:21 Minamata today59:07 The decline of political activism in Japan102:02 Take-aways and stories about storytelling Further Reading: Flaherty, Darryl, Public Law, Private Practice Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2013) George, Timothy S., Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Harvard Univ. Press, 2002) Smith, Eugene W. & Aileen M. Smith, Minamata: The Story of the Poisoning of a City, and of the People Who Chose to Carry the Burden of Courage (Holt, Rinehart, 1975) Upham, Frank K., Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan (Harvard Univ. Press, 1989)