November 1st 2016
Welcome to November. It’s really started to feel like fall. Today the air is crisp and cool. When the sun shines you can smell the warmth. This morning we harvested kaki [persimmon] from the trees – climbing high up in a ladder and I thought if I did this everyday for all my life I think I’d be happy.
I’m sitting outside at the river’s edge as I write, and it reminds me of our first day here at Garanse House, when Tatemaru, Jado and I were picking wild flowers for the dinner table. The water is the same but the air is cold now, so the thought of swimming is no longer on anybodies mind. There are plastic bags floating in the river, blown away from the garbage drop-spot and now I will go pick them up. A clean river is a happy river, especially here in Minamata.
This is an excerpt taken from my journal during my time spent in Minamata in the fall of 2016. What I loved most about Minamata was its commitment to keeping nature clean, happy and sustainable. However, if you look up Minamata on google (or let’s say Ecosia! Use this search engine instead, it plants trees!) you will hardly see anything about the modern town. You will be bombarded with articles on Minamata Disease, a horrible tragedy that occurred in the mid 1900s (specifically beginning in 1932). Chisso, a plastics manufacturing company was dumping their waste into the Shiranui Sea, and this waste contained methylmercury, which poisoned the fish. The fish ate the mercury and the people ate the fish…. Thousands of people were affected, many of which died a painful and confusing death.
Today, however, Minamata is striving to be better. The city as a whole focuses on ecological sustainability. Some residents are still afflicted by the residual effects and symptoms of Minamata Disease, thus making others acutely aware of the necessity to keep nature clean, healthy and unpolluted for the sake of the whole population.
As the pollution by indestructible plastics becomes more apparent around the world, it is important for small villages like those surrounding Minamata (in this case, Fukuro, where Garanse House is located) to be careful of their waste. This, the residents of Minamata surely know. Bags in the river will not be tolerated, not by locals nor by me, as a foreign visitor. Let’s all do our part to keep our natural world clean and healthy.
To learn more about Minamata Disease check out Michiko Ishimure’s autoethnographical book Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 