Minamata Forum Tells of the Legacy of Industrial Pollution

The Minamata Forum is an organization inaugurated in 1997, encouraged by the success of the Minamata Tokyo Exhibition held in 1996. Ever since, they have performed various activities, such as exhibitions around Japan and monthly seminars, aiming to help people "reflect upon modernization and humanity through the lessons of the Minamata disease."

In 1956, the first official case of Minamata disease, which has become a symbol of industrial pollution, was reported in a small fishing village in southern Kyushu. Its cause was untreated methyl mercury, a byproduct of acetaldehyde discharged by a local factory into Minamata Bay, which until then was rich in fish and shellfish. The most severely stricken were the coastal fishermen, but eventually the disease was passed on to the next generation through placenta, from mother to fetus, leading to congenital cases. The outcomes were not only the disastrous health effects on the victims, but also discrimination and poverty, destruction of the environment and the breakdown of a community.

The tendency for societies to seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number is often at the expense of lives of victims and nature. The Minamata Disease is a symbol of the contradictions that surface through the human pursuit of modernization. The forum believes that unless the root causes are eradicated there will be no end to the saga of tragedies even if the damaged environment is restored in specific cases.

The activities of the forum also include environmental education to convey to all those living today the message of human dignity and the reality of the social costs of environmental destruction, through the voices of the people who were affected. More than 100,000 people have visited the exhibitions since 1996. An exhibition in Sapporo, Hokkaido, is scheduled in May 2004.



Posted: 2004/05/26 10:16:51 AM
Japanese version