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Minamata is the name of a neurological disease that closely resembles cerebral palsy. It develops from poisoning by methyl mercury that enters the food chain from industrial wastewater. It was first identified at Minamata, Japan. The expression “mad as a hatter” derives from the use of mercury compounds that affect the human brain that were absorbed by tanners who made top hats from rabbit fur using mercurous nitrate. Somewhat similar symptoms developed in the people of Minamata from the seafood they ate, which was drawn from Minamata Bay.

Minamata Bay is located on the western side of Kyushu, the southernmost of the four main Japanese islands. The bay is part of the Shiranui Sea, which is abundant in fish, clams, crabs, and other sea creatures. Fish has long been the main protein source of the people of the area. The Chisso factory was located between Hyakken Harbor and the Minamata River. Chisso (“nitrogen”) was originally a fertilizer company. The factory had opened in 1907 at the request of the townspeople who were farmers and fishermen. By the middle of the 1920s Chisso was dumping its industrial wastes into Hyakken Harbor and Minamata Bay. To compensate for the damage, it paid off the people who were opposed to the polluting.

The practice of dumping was acceptable to the town because in Japanese culture solidarity is an important value. The townspeople who worked at the factory accepted Jun Noguchi, the owner, as a paternal protector, which was a common attitude toward elites in prewar Japanese culture. During the prewar and wartime eras Chisso was making acetaldehyde and using mercury as a compound in the manufacture of drugs. However, after World War II it moved into petrochemicals related to the manufacture of plastics. It prospered and expanded operations, and its polluted wastewater discharges into Minamata Bay increased. The new products led to the discharge of methyl mercury, which is an organic compound that carries the heavy metal mercury.

Minamata disease was first noticed in the area when cats, fed fish from the bay, began to exhibit strange symptoms: They would dance and then die. So bizarre were the symptoms that the idea spread that the dying cats were engaging in “cat suicides.” No one was aware that the deaths were being caused by mercury retained in the body from locally caught fish, and that the cats were victims of mercury poisoning. The mercury was causing an encephalopathy. Symptoms in humans included numbness, blurred vision, slurred speech, involuntary movements, and other abnormal neural behaviors. Some people thought that they were going crazy and would shout in an uncontrollable manner. Some lapsed into a coma. Others committed suicide, in part because the Japanese view of medicine held that illness was due to a personal defect that warranted ostracism. Some people suffered brain damage.

The number of babies born with congenital defects increased dramatically. In addition, because mercury settles in the nerves of the human body, it affected children between the ages of five and 11 severely. In all, at least 3,000 people were severely affected by Minamata disease. The last straw came when birds that had also been poisoned from eating the contaminated fish began to fall from the sky.

For years Chisso refused to acknowledge that a problem existed, or that they were the cause of it. By 1963 the Japanese public health service had traced the disease to Chisso’s mercury discharges. Payments were made, but the settlements were slim compared to the suffering endured. In the late 1950s, the people of the area organized a “Mutual Help Society.” They engaged in grassroots politics, but with little success. Minamata Bay remains polluted with sediment riddled with mercury.

Bibliography:

Timothy S. George, Minamata: Pollution and the Struggle for Democracy in Postwar Japan (Harvard University Press, 2001);
Akio Mishima, Bitter Sea: The Human Cost of Minamata Disease (Kosei Publishing Company, 1992);
W. Eugene Smith, Minamata (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975);
Tadao Tsubaki and Katsuro Irukayama, Minamata Disease: Methylmercury Poisoning in Minamata and Niigata, Japan (Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1977).