“In the worldview of contemporary capitalism there is no place for such antiquated forms of societal organization; fishermen and farmers still clinging to the age-old dream of a harmonious symbiosis between man and nature are mere stumbling blocks in the way of our triumphant Ideology of Progress. If we want to avoid what seems to be our unavoidable destiny – that of paving the way for a future apocalypse, the last in world history – let us open our eyes and see ourselves, the whole itinerary of our modern civilization, reflected in the fate of the Minamata Disease patients” (Ishimure 2003, p. 329)
In the 1950s the first victims of Minamata Disease in southern Japan started to display symptoms of methylmercury poisoning: numbness, stumbling, disjointed speech, gradual loss of sight and hearing, all of this leading more times then not to a painful and confusing death. The poisoning was the result of the plastics manufacturing company Chisso, who dumped their polluted waste water into the Shiranui Sea, which eventually made its way onto the plates of coastal fishermen (see my other post on this problem here). This disease was not only medical, but social and political. Those inflicted with the disease were ostracized by those more removed from the sea and while families of victims battled to close the Chisso plant, those who worked for Chisso, and thus depended on them to feed their families, fought to keep it open.
The recent news of mercury poisoning among the Yanomami has brought me to revisit Ishimure’s account of Minamata disease and the horrors that it brought. Chisso knowingly poisoned over thousands of people. Is the government of Brazil not doing the same? In the Amazon, the pollution seems to be less concentrated and more complex; it is not a single factory pumping poison into the environment but a whole horde of perpetrators seeking wealth and glory in the form of gold within the Amazon’s forests and rivers.
Michiko Ishimure’s autoethnographical account of Minamata Disease comes from somebody who lived through the chaos created when putting progress before life. Her text goes beyond the act of polluting and admonishes the root cause of all this suffering: capitalism. It is a political treatise to end the destruction wrought by profit, greed and progress. Today, Michiko’s call to “open our eyes” are echoed by other environmentalists who are fighting for places like the Amazon and people like the Yanomami. When will this ecocide stop? When will we see that “the fishermen and farmers clinging to the age-old dream of harmonious symbiosis between man and nature” are not “mere stumbling blocks” and should be acknowledged as viable contemporaries deserving of the equal right to freedom and a good life, deserving to not be poisoned and murdered.
In the same way that the Yanomami wish to live on their land in peace by their own means, the fishers of Minamata just wanted to return to the sea: “I want to have two strong legs to stand firmly on the ground. I want to have two strong hands with which I can work. With these hands I want to row my own boat and go to gather fresh sea-lettuce. It makes me want to cry. I want so much to be out on the sea again… just one more time” (Ishimure 2003: 158). As for Yuki, the woman whose words Ishimure recorded in her book, it is too late, Minamata Disease took her along with some 1,700 others. But for many of the Yanomami there is still a chance. For more information about how to act against the threats to the Yanomami, visit Survival International’s webpage.
References:
Ishimure, M. 2003 [1972]. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. Trans. L. Monnet. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Japanese Studies.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 