neonsetr.blogg.se

Some six decades on, you could argue that the story of Minamata is on its way to a neat resolution. “Here’s a problem where most of the world agrees we can do something.” That’s good news, made possible because finding alternatives to mercury in industrial processes is not too difficult, says Susan Keane of the National Resources Defense Council. Just this week, the arrangements for its implementation are being negotiated at the first Conference of the Parties in Geneva. It entered into legal force in August 2017. Since it was signed in 2013, 74 countries have ratified the Minamata Convention. With a UN treaty that governs the use of mercury, called the Minamata Convention on Mercury, they aim to prevent something like this from ever happening anywhere again. The tragedy has also given them a prime directive. It acts as a sort of first cause for mercury researchers and policy makers, many of whom have made pilgrimages to Minamata or who have met survivors like Rimiko at international conferences. The mass poisoning that happened next is famous in Japan and around the globe.

She smiles during this part of the story. While her siblings sport bowl cuts, her short brown hair parts in the same place today as it did then. It’s easy-she still has the same round, open face, and high eyebrows. Then she asks audiences to pick her out of the line-up. When she gives public talks, Rimiko pauses at this point of the story to show a black-and-white picture of her and her three siblings in formal clothes. Her elder brother gathered shellfish and crabs. Her father had a job at the factory that caused the pollution, but he himself would go fishing after coming home at night. Rimiko’s grandfather was a fisherman-every day he brought some of his catch home. Like almost everyone else in Minamata, and especially like the three other families living in their small hamlet close to the pollution’s source, they ate a lot of seafood in the early 1950s. In her living room, Rimiko brings out green tea and local pastries, sits down with her mother and husband, and starts talking. At every step, the mercury-a potent neurotoxin-became more and more concentrated, until it ended up between a pair of chopsticks. But the company lost so much mercury in the process that it later established a subsidiary to mine it back from polluted sediment nearby.Īfter flowing out of the factory’s drainage channel, some of the mercury was taken in by plankton, which were then eaten by bigger things like horse mackerel, sardines, and shellfish, which in turn were eaten by still bigger creatures like cutlass fish and black porgy. The factory was using the mercury to speed along a reaction that produced acetaldehyde, an ingredient in many plastics.

The cause? From 1932 to 1968, the Chisso chemical factory discharged up to 600 tonnes of mercury into what was then a harbor.

Reclaimed after a long, expensive construction project, this was ground zero for a mystery illness known first as “strange disease” or “sauntering disease” or, ominously, “dancing-cat disease.” Now it’s just called Minamata disease. And under that are millions of tons of mercury sludge. Under all this new land is a plastic seal. Standing there now, you see roads, athletic fields, three separate museum facilities, a seaside memorial park, and a scenic bamboo garden-because bamboo roots grow sideways instead of down. Now the steep edge of Myojin Point in Minamata, Japan, doesn’t overlook the water. He would perch up there and call down to say whether the fish were coming, Rimiko says. During one of the most famous environmental disasters in history, this tree stood over the calm, clear waters of the Shiranui Sea. Walking by the side of her house, Rimiko Yoshinaga points at the broad, vine-encrusted tree her grandfather used to climb.