Book Review: Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea by Mariko Tatsumoto
By Pamela Okano
NAP Contributor
Those of us of a certain age may remember the poignant photograph in a 1972 Life magazine of a Japanese woman, Ryoko Kamimura, bathing her severely deformed daughter, Tomoko, in an ofuro (Japanese bath). (To see the photograph, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomoko_and_Mother_in_the_Bath.) Tomoko had been poisoned by methylmercury while she was still in her mother’s womb. The methylmercury came from wastewater that the Chisso Corporation had been dumping into the bay between 1951 to 1968, as part of its plastics manufacturing in Minamata, Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. The disease came to be known as “Minimata Disease.” More than 12,000 victims have been officially recognized by the Japanese government.
Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea is a novel by Mariko Tatsumoto that describes the effects of the disease on the community. It has been years of a long struggle to make the Japanese and prefectural governments realize that there was a critical problem which needed to be addressed. The people most severely affected tended to be fishermen and their families.
The two protagonists in the novel are Kuge Kiyoshi (“Kiyo”), the son of a Chisso waste manager, and Akaji Yuki, the daughter of a poor fisherman. They meet as teenagers in 1956 and fall in love. Yuki is a talented artist and Kiyoshi wants to be a medical doctor but tragedy strikes the Akaji household. Yuki’s uncle, Higano, gets the disease. His limbs are stiff and he has trouble walking and eating. Because the disease is unknown at the time, doctors place victims like Higano in quarantine, in case the disease is contagious.
Unfortunately, this has the effect of making victims’ families social outcasts as neighbors will not have anything to do with them, even after the disease is found to be the result of contamination. Eventually, Higano develops convulsions and later dies. Yuki’s father, mother, and baby sister also get the disease. The family, which was already poor, is reduced to destitution.
In the meantime, Kiyo has been helping a doctor, Hosokawa Hajime (a real-life person), to study the disease. In addition, he has been raiding his family’s pantry and spending his allowance on food for the Akaji family. After researchers tell him that the contamination is linked to Chisso.Kiyo tries to convince his father to do something about the wastewater that Chisso has been dumping into the bay.
Although the company would eventually install a “Cyclator” that is supposed to purify the water, Chisso knows the wastewater contains mercury and it will not send the wastewater through the machine. In other words, the Cyclator is all for show. Chisso also knows that the story spread about the contamination due to dumped World War II explosives is not true and that it is putting its own profits above safety. Aided and abetted by the city and prefectural governments, Chisso does all it can to hide its complicity. Indeed, in 1972, Chisso employees attacked and badly injured the photographer who took the famous Life magazine photograph.
It was not until 1970 that the Japanese Diet passed a series of environmental laws that, at the time, were the most stringent in the world. And it was not until 1973 that a trial court found Chisso guilty of negligence and ordered it to pay $66,000 per deceased person and between $59-$66,000 per living person, for a total of $3.4 million. But the case then settled, leaving the families of the deceased with nothing. Other Minamata Disease litigation is still ongoing in Japan. Chisso remains an important employer in Minamata. Its total debt for compensating victims, cleaning up the harbor, and reconstructing its factory is in the billions of dollars.
Blossoms on a Poisoned Sea is well worth reading. My only criticism is that almost everything that could possibly go wrong for Yuki went wrong, which seemed like overkill to me. But that does not detract from the story’s powerful message about the horrors of Minamata Disease, and the corporate greed and government complicity that led to it.
