CONFIRMED
Minamata: The Mercury Poisoning a Company Hid for Years
For more than three decades, a chemical factory in the small Japanese coastal town of Minamata discharged mercury into the sea, and for years the company that owned it knew, or had every reason to know, what that mercury was doing to the people who lived there. The Chisso Corporation made acetaldehyde using a process that produced methylmercury as a by-product, and from the 1930s it released that poison, in its untreated wastewater, into Minamata Bay and the surrounding Shiranui Sea. The mercury accumulated in the fish and shellfish that were the daily food of the local fishing families, and it destroyed their nervous systems. By the 1950s the town was witnessing terrible scenes: cats convulsing and hurling themselves into the sea, birds dropping from the sky, and then people — fishermen and their wives and their children — struck down by a mysterious illness that robbed them of control over their bodies, their senses, and sometimes their lives. Children were born already poisoned, having absorbed the mercury in the womb. When researchers traced the cause to the Chisso factory's effluent, the company disputed the science, funded doubt, and kept discharging mercury for years more. Most damning of all, Chisso's own company doctor had proved, in a quiet experiment with cats, that the factory's wastewater caused the disease — and the company suppressed his findings and ordered him to stop. The poisoning continued until 1968. The victims would spend decades fighting for recognition, compensation, and the simple acknowledgement of what had been done to them. This is the story of Minamata disease, one of the defining environmental catastrophes of the twentieth century, and of the long concealment at its heart.
