Minamata

How and why does Chisso's attitude reflect the attitude of the Japanese Government
throughout the post-war period towards economic growth?

Following World War II, Japan refocused it's goal from being an imperial superpower to
being an economic superpower. They, voiced by their new prime minister, planned to double
their gross domestic product within ten years. This economic growth came at a cost which has
not been fully determined, even to this day. The subject of the film, Minimata, is Chisso, a
manufacturing company who was polluting the bay around Minamata. Chisso can be easily seen
as a parallel to the production and pollution standards of the Japanese Government at the time.
Chisso, prior to World War II, was a massive Zaibatsu with holdings in both Japan and
Korea. They established factories in areas where labor was cheap, exploiting the people by
offering low wages for highly dangerous work. At the end of World War II, they were forced to
change gears, just as Japan as a whole did, refocusing their manufacturing off of wartime goods
to plastics, thus feeding the mass consumer nation that Japan was growing into. This shift in
ideals combined with the Government's push to greatly increase production led to many
oversights as far as the effects of such manufacturing would be concerned. The company, who
would have been fully aware of the effects of mercury at the time, poured gallons of unprocessed
mercury into Minimata Bay for over thirty years before they were stopped. This oversight is
reminiscent of the black market in the weeks before the United States Occupying force arrived in
Japan. Due to a purposeful lack of oversight by the hands of upper level officials, millions of

dollars in public goods disappeared into the hands of the Zaibatsu corporations running the
majority of Japanese manufacturing. One could speculate that Chisso itself may have been
involved in that process, seeing as they were prominent manufacturer of explosives throughout
the war. The purposeful lack of oversight about the waste of such mass manufacturing would
have greatly benefited those in charge, at the expense of those living near the factory.
The denial and cover up that followed are a projection of the Japanese government's
treatment of many issues. Many different research studies and groups were funded to research
the Minimata Disease and it's cause. In the film, Chisso has a doctor who determines, through
testing on cats, that the waste from the factory was causing the problems. He suddenly dies with
no other explanation and no one carries on his work. According to the United Nations University
reading, once research started to point towards the factories waste, all those informed on the
workings of the factory were silenced. No samples of the Chisso factory waste were allowed to
be collected or tested without permission from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry
(MITI). Even the engineering department of Kumamoto University, which knew extensively
about the workings of the factory would not share with the Medical Research Group from
Kumamoto University. Once research was released stating that Mercury was the cause of the
disease, Chisso released their own scientific studies disproving the claims of the University
medical group with claims that they used unsatisfactory methods of research to come to their
conclusion. In October of 1959, Chisso officially knew that mercury was the cause of Minimata
Disease, but instead of taking responsibility, they offered to pay a small sum of money to the
fishing villages in exchange for them not pursuing any further reparations. Throughout all of this,
there was very little government oversight, as if they were turning a blind eye until the last
possible second. This is parallel to the treatment of the Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown,

where the United States warned people to move to twenty miles from the epicenter, and the
Japanese Government declared it safe to five kilometers, and then expanded that measure as the
effects became apparent.
These environmental issues are also expressed in the Japanese government's treatment of
large scale fishing and other aquatic operations. Japan, as a nation, relies very heavily on the sea
for food, and in history other resources as well. They used to be a large whaling nation, which
brought in large profits because so much of a whale is usable materials. From meat and fats to
the baleen and bone, whales were a huge bonus to all seafaring nations. In present day however,
whaling is illegal and any whaling that occurs is strictly regulated or punished. The International
Whaling Commission, strives to enforce these regulations but are faced with strong backlash
from nations like Japan, Russia, and Norway, who have historically relied heavily on the whaling
industry. Activist Richard O'Barry, subject of the documentary The Cove claims that Japan has
purchased support from many small developing nations in their quest to fight the International
Whaling Committee, as well as in their fight to maintain that dolphins and other porpoises are
medium sized sea mammals, not large sea mammals. This loophole allows them to hunt dolphin
as it doesn't fall under the purview of the International Whaling Committee. The significance of
this issue is the presence of the very same mercury in these dolphins as was present in the
Minamata fish. Due to bioaccumulation, predators such as the dolphin, eat prey contaminated
with unnatural waste, and accumulate a much higher concentration than the prey originally had.
The Japanese government still supports dolphin fishing and sale, even though the meat is not
considered safe to eat by medical standards. Richard O'Barry also shows evidence in his
documentary of the presence of dolphin meat in school lunches from public schools throughout
Japan. Due to attention from Mr. O'Barry's documentary, the dolphin fishing practices in Japan

have hit record lows, due to regulation from foreign bodies and enforcement by the Japanese
themselves. However, without the external pressures, as was seen in Minamata, change from
profitable to environmentally safe are not recognized or enforced within Japan without pressure.
The government's solution to the toxic waste in Minamata Bay was to bury it all in the
eco-park they built utop one and a half million cubic meters of mercury drudged from Minamata
Bay, then topped with fresh soil. This temporary storage is running out of life span, but no plans
have yet been revealed to deal with the waste under the eco-park, as well as what is left in the
bay. The practice of oversight and ignoring problems until they surface is very toxic, and yet
seems to be a regular practice for environmental issues in Japan. Just as in Godzilla, nothing is
done until the problem is so great that they have to use super weapons to destroy it, Japan is still
dealing with the consequences of Minamata; The time is running out on their temporary waste
disposal site. The problems people faced in Minamata were trivialized and misdirected until the
last possible second. Japan's history of treating issues in this way is represented perfectly by the
actions of those in this film and those it affected.