Soviet correspondent V. Tsvetov worked in Japan for a long time, knew and fell in love with the Land of the Rising Sun. He wrote many enthusiastic books about the country itself and about its hardworking inhabitants, but the book "Poisoners from Tissot" stands apart. In it, the author told (with all the details) about the terrible tragedy that happened on the east coast of the Japanese island of Kyushu. There is a small fishing village of Minamata. There was a time when people fed fish and fish fed them. Women used silkworm and rice bran to feed, and the men took it to the sea. The time came for fishing, and the boats were returning full of mullets, herring, crabs and shrimps … In these fertile places, boats sometimes carried so many perches that it seemed as if trembling golden mountains were moving towards the shore. Residents believedthat Daikoku himself - the god of luck and wealth - often visits them.
There was fish, there was a holiday. On the shore, the greeters blew into large shells and danced to this simple music. The shrimp pulled out by the net looked like a blooming sakura. Such beauty! But it was precisely this beauty that brought illness with it, and then death.
At first, there were simply fewer fish. It was the fish that brought with it the disease, which by the name of the village also became known as "minamata" and which soon entered all Japanese medical reference books.
The first signs of the disaster that befell the fishermen and peasants of Minamata Bay were mysterious and eerie. An unknown ailment caused the death of the muscles of the arms and legs, loss of speech, and affected the brain. But it didn't start with this …
At first, the cats got mad in the village. They screeched wildly, rushed like arrows through the streets, from all over they flew into houses and people, and then rushed to the sea, jumped into the waves and drowned. Seagulls, soaring into the sky, suddenly folded their wings, stuck in a corkscrew into the water and remained there lifeless. The perches swam to the shore, but they were so sleepy and lethargic that the children could easily catch them with their hands.
And then people got sick with this "cat dance". Doctors from hospitals in Kumamoto Prefecture determined that the patients' brains were affected by particles of some kind of heavy metal. And then the gaze of the researchers turned to the Minamata Bay, where a canal stretched through which water with industrial waste from the Tissot concern flowed down. The analysis showed that in the sea, at the mouth of the channel, there are particles of selenium, thallium, manganese, copper, lead, mercury.
The Tissot Corporation outragedly rejected the medical conclusion that the source of water pollution (and therefore disease) is the plant in Minamata. Moreover, its representatives stated that the production process does not use any substances capable of poisoning water. The corporation fell for this lie. At the insistence of the doctors, the plant removed the canal from the bay, and since September 1958, waste from it poured into the river that flows through the village. Three months later, the disease put the people living along its banks to hospitals.
The plant in Minamata is an old enterprise, it went into operation in 1908. At first, the inhabitants of the village were happy: after all, a plant is a job for those who do not have it, it is an increase in fishing income, an introduction to urban culture. It will no longer be necessary for men to go to work in other places, and women will no longer have to sell themselves to feed their families. At the grand opening of the plant, its director wrote in the “Book of the history of the village”: “With the construction of the plant, the atmosphere in Minamata has become fresher. Its population has increased, trade has expanded, transport links with other regions of the country have revived. Hardly anyone could then even imagine that in fifty years this recording would be perceived as a mockery!
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In 1908, the plant produced fifteen tons of carbide - an enormous productivity at that time. The next year, ammonium sulfate was produced here. The pace of production increased every year, and already in the mid-1920s, dead fish surfaced for the first time in Minamata Bay. Then the dead fish floated up repeatedly, but "Tissot" paid compensation to the fishermen. True, not very generous, "so that the craving for luxury does not become irresistible among the fishermen."
When the founder of the corporation, Jun Noguchi, passed away in 1944, no one knew that a long tail of crimes was behind him. But in the memory of the Japanese, his name will forever be associated with "Minamata disease" - the first ever case of poisoning people as a result of environmental pollution.
According to experts, by the end of the 1960s, one hundred thousand residents in the prefectures of Kumamoto and Kagoshima were affected to one degree or another by the "Minamata disease". Among the fishermen and peasants of the village itself, the functions of the sense organs, hearing organs or organs of vision were impaired, six percent of children began to be born with cerebral palsy (throughout the country, 0.2 percent of babies were born with such a disease). Forty babies in Minamata were full of symptoms of the disease, from seizures to loss of speech.
In 1950, the production of acetaldehyde at the plant reached its highest capacity, and the discharge of mercury into the bay became the largest in the entire history of the plant. It was enough for the corporation to spend only three percent of the profits on the construction of treatment facilities so that the tragedy of the village did not grow to the size of a national disaster, but …
In late 1959, reports from doctors at Kumamoto University about the real cause of the disease rocked the whole of Japan. Factory guards could no longer obstruct all kinds of commissions that arrived here almost every month. The public was startled to learn that the mercury content of crabs caught in Minamata Bay is 35.7 ppm, mullet - 10.6 ppm, and shrimp - 5.6 ppm. Japanese environmental protection legislation allows for a mercury content of 0.4 ppm in fish. And when they measured it at the mouth of the sewage canal, it turned out that the concentration of mercury in it was 2010 ppm.
After the shock of this news, the authorities were finally in motion. No, they didn't close the factory. They did not even demand an explanation from the Tissot management. The Economic Department of Kumamoto Prefecture has only banned the sale of fish caught in the bay. As for fishing, this was left to the discretion of the fishermen themselves. And the corporation itself announced that during the Second World War, American bombers sank a transport with ammunition, which the plant was producing at that time, in the bay. The pollution was due to the dispersion of explosives in the water. And since the plant worked for the defense of the country, the government should clean the bay.
Japan entered the second half of the 20th century as a super-powerful technical power. The largest tankers, the smallest computers, the tallest buildings (among countries with high seismicity), the fastest trains … However, when it came time to take stock of the insane technological progress, the Japanese had to admit that they had gained a lot, but lost more.
In Togonura Bay, for example, since 1967, no one dares to swim: the water here is brownish-red from chemical waste. Fishermen go fishing 50-60 kilometers from the coast, but even at this distance they come across ugly fish of unprecedented shape.
The Urui river flows into the bay, which is called "miracle". One day reporters from the Mainity newspaper took water from it and developed a film in it. The newspaper printed these photographs with the caption: "The miracle on the Urui River was due to the efforts of the paper mills, which turned the water in the river into a developer."
In 1976, the inhabitants of the island of Tsushima showed signs of the disease "itai-itai" - cadmium poisoning.
Residents of the Minamata village have filed a lawsuit against the Tisso Corporation. In 1972, when the trial lasted for the fourth year, a visiting session was arranged. The judge and his assistants went to see the patients, whose illness did not allow them to leave the house and come to Kumamoto.
The lawsuit was also considered by Yoshiko Uemura, and she told the following in court: “My daughter Tokomo was born in June 1951. Two days after giving birth, the girl's body cramped. I hugged her and thought: I’ll warm her up, the cramp will pass. But the girl writhed more and more ….
The judge came to the house to question Tokomo herself. But the only sound that she learned to make in 21 years of life was: "ah-ah". And Tokomo would not have heard the judge's questions - she was born deaf. The judge could not decide if she saw him. There was no thought in the girl's wide, unblinking eyes.
In a small neighboring yard, covered with rubble, the judge saw a thin, angular boy. Awkwardly throwing a rock (which apparently served as a ball for him), he was just as awkwardly trying to hit it with a baseball bat. His terribly twisted hands did not obey, but the boy stubbornly, as if wound up, continued to throw the "ball". The awkward movements that he repeated with mechanical methodicalness were terrifying. And when the child turned to the hail, the judge saw that his chin was already covered with graying stubble.
The judge looked at the aging boy for a long time, and then turned and quietly walked out of the yard …
From the book: "HUNDRED GREAT DISASTERS". ON THE. Ionina, M. N. Kubeev