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Jonathan Hafetz

Hi, I'm Jonathan Hafetz, and welcome to Law and Film, a podcast that explores the rich connections between law and film. Law is critical to many films. Film, in turn, tells us a lot about the law. In each episode, we'll examine a film that's noteworthy from a legal perspective. What legal issues does the film explore? What does it get right about the law and what does it get wrong?

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Jonathan Hafetz

How is law important to understanding the film? And what does the film teach us about the law and about the larger social and cultural context in which it operates? This episode looks at two films that examine the environmental disaster. I mean, I'm out to Japan, Noriega touching Photos, documentary, Minamata Their Victims and the world from 1971, and Andrei Levitan is Minamata from 2020.

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Jonathan Hafetz

A Hollywood feature film that tells the story through the famous American photographer Eugene Smith, renowned 1932 to 68. The Chozo Corporation, a local petrochemical and plastics maker, dumped approximately 27 tons of mercury into Minamata Bay, poisoning fish and ultimately the people who ate them. Several thousand people died, and many, many more suffered crippling injuries, often with severe mental and physical effects.

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Jonathan Hafetz

The corporation's environmental pollution sparked legal and political battles that would last decades and reverberate throughout Japan, and indeed continue to this day. It also underscored a darker side of Japan's post-World War Two economic miracle with me to discuss the films and the insights they provide into Japanese law and society. Is Darrow Flaherty. Darrow was a historian of war and social change in early modern Japan.

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Jonathan Hafetz

He has published work on the emergence of Japan's legal profession during the 19th century, the Meiji Restoration in world history, and the 20th century history of the jury in Japan. He's an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware, where he teaches courses on Japanese, Asian, and world history. Welcome, Darryl.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. Thank you for having me, Jonathan. It's very wonderful to be here.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So just tell us a little bit about the history behind the shiso chemical factory.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. So she was actually established in 1908, started out as a synthetic fertilizer factory, and it was founded by a factory president, Zhou Noguchi, famous for not valuing the local people. He said, you know, treat the local people like, cattle herd animals. And, you know, we'll do fine. We'll squeeze them and we'll produce and contribute to.

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Darryl  Flaherty

I mentioned, the Japanese economic miracle. I think you're referring to the postwar period. But even in the early 20th century, the idea was, you know, the slogan and the end of the Meiji period was rich nation, strong army. So we need to think about the history of imperialism. So the idea was, you know, here's an agricultural, largely agricultural economy and that historical moment, but we're going to transform it into a petrochemical, heavy manufacturing economy, and we're going to imperialist Asia through that process.

00;03;09;06 - 00;03;30;05

Darryl  Flaherty

And so she so was a central company in that story. It spread out and expanded into Korea, the Korean peninsula, and was the largest chemical manufacturer in Asia for quite a while. That's so it's cited the company, in a sense, in this very remote location from the political center in Japan at the time that it was sited there, just generally a remote location.

00;03;30;05 - 00;03;48;18

Darryl  Flaherty

You can now get to the town of Mina matter more or less using the high speed rail, the bullet train. There's now bullet train that stops. There's a new Mina Marta station, and then you just transfer it to local rail. So it's. It's much easier to get there now, but in the time that the company opened it, this was a remote location far from the center.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And that was even the case when we're talking about Minamoto in the postwar period. There are scenes in the film where the activists are going to different events. You know, they're riding on the train and it's a long journey. They're always looking exhausted and worn out when they arrive. So that's sort of key. So in a nutshell.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And so that and you locate right in the island of Kyushu, right in the Japan and.

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Darryl  Flaherty

The southernmost island of Japan, and then the small, again, remote bay, so far from other activities. And so was the factory town. Oftentimes people say, oh, you know, it's consistent with a historical past, when there would be the castle in the center of the town, and now there's the factory in the center of the town. And so it was a major employer in the town.

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Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, this is a very small town. At the maximum it was at 50,000 people resident there, and at least a quarter to a third of the population was employed by Chie. So in some regard, I mean, then there would of course be subcontractors and people benefit, you know, retailers selling to so employees. So the town was really beholden to Chie.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So, but then around the minimart, the bay or all these, you know, sort of the folks who were living closer to the environment, fishing people and that kind of thing. And those were the folks who were largely affected by the effluent.

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Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, I feel like that sushi modo movie documentary captures sort of both those things. Right. The importance of teacher to the town, but also fishing to the life of the community. I mean, there's some really beautiful shots of fishermen at work in the I mean, about the Bay area.

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Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, that documentary is powerful and poignant. He's constantly juxtaposing, yes, those pictures of the water, I mean, and if you go there, I mean, it's it's shot in black and white. So in some ways you can't quite capture but get this beautiful pictures of the fishing vessels sort of bobbing up and down in the water and the folks fishing off of that.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And then there's that sort of exchange, that encounter, that he has with the octopus catcher. I'm forgetting the fisherman's name, but he's this fisherman whose family members have suffered from the motor disease, and he catches octopus in the bay. And you can tell this is not a this is a person living very close to the margins, very close to the land.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And he's, you know, capturing the octopus and putting it around his waist on his belt. And there's this very moving interlude of him sort of moving through the water, wading through the water. But yeah, you get that powerful sense of the fishing life and the fishing people. And then at the same time, you get these juxtapositions. Later in the film, there's this aerial shot with the voiceover of the activists standing in Kumamoto city center, and he's saying, you know, if we care about our environment, then, you know, we'll stand up to the corporations, get this aerial shot of the entire factory complex, which dominates the landscape.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So you have these two juxtapositions, the sort of bobbing, small single vessel floating out in the water, and then that aerial shot of the factory. And also in the movie, there's a quote from, the young. And I mean, it's tough. People often say fishermen because it's easy to say, but, you know, fishing folk, I think is really what it is because it was men and women working together.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And there was a really poignant daughter who lost her father to Minamoto disease. And she was saying, you know, he knew everything. He could read the tide, he knew where the fish were. And now that he's passed away, I can't catch anything like she was saying, you know, just a devastating loss for her, both financially but also the emotional loss of her father, juxtaposing both of those things, the fishing life and then the factory and and modernity against the natural village and nature.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah, it's important to note as a result of effluent from the factories, there is a fishing union, mutual aid society for the fishing people, and they had confronted the factory numerous times starting in the 1920s. So episodically, the factory, as a result of effluent, would reduce their catch and so they would get payments. And so this sets up the context for some of the tension in both of the movies later, between these people who are willing to make conciliatory settlements with the factory and then others who want to sue.

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Jonathan Hafetz

So that so they the poisoning, the mercury poisoning, that's the cause. How and when was that first discovered?

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Darryl  Flaherty

Discovered in humans, I guess we should say. First off. So there are people began to notice, although the cats are they call it mad cat disease. The cats were running around, falling over, salivating. Cats were dying. Cats are critical in a fishing community because they eat mice that are chewing on fishing nets. So initially people saw a disease in the cats.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And then in 53 there were these two children, sisters, I believe, who went to the chief. So interesting. The hospital is the Chico hospital, right. So it's it's really a factory town and I've been there. And you really feel that and you still sort of feel that even now in the 21st century, so decades later and decades after these episodes.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So they went to the factory hospital in the factory town, and the doctors didn't know what to make of it. So that was sort of 53 by the end of the 50s. 59, we get the sense of, oh, there's definitely this thing called Minamata disease. People started calling it minimal disease. And then 1968, you get the government recognizing that methylmercury was the cause for this, but the company concealed the fact that it was doing experiments itself.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And this comes up later in the court case. There's visible evidence in the community of of effects from the effluent. As I mentioned, the cats, they're also birds falling out of the sky. Fisher folk in the movie talk about how, oh, it was wonderful. The fish seemed drunk and it was easy to catch them. We were able to catch these enormous fish.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And so if you were paying attention, you would notice and could see that something was wrong. And so we first see, you know, the first patients in the 1950s, 1953 and 1956, that becomes more clear. And then, you know, in 1959, there was an awareness that something was seriously wrong.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And some people write attributed to they thought it was like a plague, like a airborne disease or something else. Right.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So it's interesting and it's interesting in light of our recent experience with the pandemic, Covid pandemic, initially, people did not know in the community. The company did know that it was putting mercury and many other poisons. So the company knew that its wastewater was contaminated. But they thought, well, their argument was that it was parts per million.

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Darryl  Flaherty

This comes up both in the Levitas movie. It doesn't come up in the city of film, but, you know, the sensors that, well, it's parts per million and it's okay. But they knew and there were all these different theories initially like, oh, maybe it's cadmium poisoning, or maybe it's manganese, or sometimes they blamed the fishermen, said, oh, you're using different kinds of chemicals to do night fishing, and that can cause some of these symptoms.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So the company obfuscated in the early phase. And also, yes, people thought, oh, it's a contagious disease. They would sanitize the victims homes and they would spray the victims themselves. And so the victims were ostracized. And already there was this town versus fisher people sort of dynamic. Most of the fishing people didn't live right in the town. They were from these surrounding towns, but they would shop in the town.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And the movie talks about this, about how people wouldn't take their money, wouldn't touch their money. They couldn't get into cabs. The Levitt Trust movie almost. It's not the opening scene, but it's when Gene Smith arrives in Minamata. And this is from, testimony. And that appears in their book The Minamoto, a book by Eugene Smith. And, and then Smith, his then wife, but there's a guy carrying, a corpse through the town to someone wrapped in the sheet.

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Darryl  Flaherty

If you don't look closely or you're not paying attention, you might miss it. Or if you don't know what it is, you wouldn't know what's going on there. But again, the more knowledge you have watching, particularly the Levitas movie, the more you can get out of it. And that was someone who was ostracized. Probably not picked up in a cab because of the connection to, I mean, the Mata disease.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So that was very challenging for the people. And many people tried to hide the fact that they had it. So this was another challenge. People trying to to engage in activism against the factory, confronted as they tried to build a sort of critical mass response, the fishing unions had long sort of campaigned for this. They would get their pay, they would episodically go and confront the factory.

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Darryl  Flaherty

But other people who were not necessarily part of the fishing union, but consumers of fish and suffering from the Minamoto disease would challenge, you know, tried to band together, but at the same time would sometimes hide. And so it's cerebral palsy, which is sometimes what the doctors at the hospital would tell them as well. And they might know in their heart of hearts.

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Darryl  Flaherty

There's one episode in the Sugimoto film where there's an activist that goes around and he has a minimal disease himself, and he goes around and tries to get people to recognize that they have it and try to ask for from the government. And he goes to a mother, and he's pretty sure both the mother and the daughter have minimal disease.

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Darryl  Flaherty

The mother says, my daughter is sick. The daughter seems to have congenital Minamata disease, and she says it's cerebral palsy. And he's like, no, I don't, you know, this is me no matter. So yeah, all kinds of challenges and ostracism and discrimination for those people who are suffering.

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Jonathan Hafetz

And it sounds like, you know, there were different paths that people, victims and other advocates, activists took. You know, what would they do to try to stop what was going on and to get justice, accountability, which would include things like reparations as well as medical care.

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Darryl  Flaherty

There's a lot in that question and unpack it a little bit. So one is just sort of what were they trying to do? And so if we think about the 60s in the United States, we think about movement politics. But actually movement politics came a little bit earlier in Japan. There was a very vibrant anti US-Japan security Alliance treaty in the 1950s in Japan, culminating in violent activism in 1960.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And there's also a peace movement against Japanese support for the United States action in the Korean War during the Korean War. And there were all these burgeoning housewives movements in the 1950s. And so many of these kinds of groups were interested in environmental questions and kind of pollution that one could see in other places, air pollution and other instances of pollution.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Pollution was very evident in the 1950s. And so you began to see movements quite early, even well before the 1960s. And many housewives movements were, you know, sort of laying claim to the issue and cause environmental activism based on their maternal. They said, you know, this this is a mother's prerogative, and we should protect communities. So the people suffering in Minnesota, there was some coverage of that.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And so there were activists from, say, Kumamoto or Kagoshima, so larger cities that were nearby, and then they would come and become involved. And then there was also the local folks, the fishing unions. So they wanted their indemnity, and they wanted the water cleaned up so they could continue fishing. As we entered the 1950s, the production of the chemical process that produced the methylmercury that went into first Minamata Bay, and then later they rerouted it, and then it went into the mean, the muddy River.

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Darryl  Flaherty

The methylmercury volume increased dramatically. So you mentioned 27,000 tons, but, you know, sort of began in the 1930s, 1940s. And then it really skyrocketed in the 1950s. So was planning to shift production to other parts of Japan. Any way they saw this facility, it required all kinds of upgrades, and they planned to just invest elsewhere and abandon this facility.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Was their plan initially. Ultimately, that didn't happen, but that was the company's plan. And so the activists were looking for a shut down of the effluent, the cleaning up of the effluent. They were also looking for some kind of money to support them. And so they engaged in different practices. There was a violent demonstration, a march from the fishing unions, with some other student activists from surrounding communities.

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Darryl  Flaherty

They went up to the gate. In the film. The guy was kind of bragging. He says, you know, we didn't touch the oil, the oil refinery part or the other parts, but we could have blown the whole thing up and brought it to the ground. I mean, you sort of get a sense of what he might have liked to have seen happen, but that doesn't happen.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Then there's another group, the so-called direct negotiation group. They believe that they want to confront shiso and get, you know, get them to apologize, which is the critical thing they're looking for. And then there was another group that was willing to say, okay, and we'll take a settlement. And that's the there was sort of this sympathy money group that was willing to take a sympathy money settlement.

00;15;07;06 - 00;15;28;29

Darryl  Flaherty

And they began they entered into negotiations, around that in the late 1950s and finalized an agreement. The first one was finalized in 1959. And then there were, I think, 6 or 7 more. So as new people began to be identified as sufferers of Minamata disease, some of them would go to the company and say, oh, we would like a compensation.

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Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, the company would make arrangements with them. And those initial agreements were quite small. And also the company said, oh, we're going to install that. And they call it and it's always in capital letters in the English language literature, which is sort of this techno optimism, techno hopefulness. The idea was that, oh, we're going to install this thing called a psych later capital C, and it's going to clean the water.

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Darryl  Flaherty

And this is in the Levitz movie where the company manager, the chisel manager, there's a photo of him standing there and he says, you know, so clean we will drink it. There's a picture of him. And that actually happened in real life. The the prefectural governor of Kumamoto went to the factory and he drank water from the site later.

00;16;04;25 - 00;16;30;22

Darryl  Flaherty

Now, they had turned off the effluent pipe to the site later on that day, because the cycle later did not remove methylmercury from the water, which they knew, you know. So there was this big press thing. And from 1959, things quieted down from the side of folks were paid. Again, not very much. I'm forgetting the exact dollar amounts, but we're talking I think it was like $27 or something like that for funeral expenses, minimal dollar amounts for the folks who are suffering.

00;16;30;22 - 00;16;40;22

Darryl  Flaherty

And they had to sign an agreement that even if it was discovered that Jizo had poisoned the water, that they wouldn't seek further damages. So that was the sort of key feature for you.

00;16;40;23 - 00;16;55;12

Jonathan Hafetz

So some people don't know. I mean, the minimal disease, it's, you know, if you see either of the movies, you look at Eugene Smith's photographs, the symptom level, I think probably range. But when they were significant, I mean, it was a neurological disease, brutal disease that I think congenital, too.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. It's tough to capture in words. And as I mentioned to people, I'm going to be chatting about the minute. But what does that say. Well, you know, we can start with I mean, the sort of the most minor thing is to have a numbness or tingling sensation in your limbs and also in your lips, oddly enough. So that's the first sort of sign or symptom.

00;17;13;13 - 00;17;33;11

Darryl  Flaherty

It's progressive. So if you continue to eat and people would get sick. And then the idea was these are fishing folk and they would just be like, oh, well, they should get more fish, give them the best fish and the biggest fish, which would be the fish with the greatest accumulation of mercury in them. And again, this is where we begin to understand these terms that are common now but didn't exist at this time, bioaccumulation and that kind of thing.

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Darryl  Flaherty

So again, it's tough to capture this tingling. Then you get narrowing of vision again, like as if you're looking through a tube. Your vision would narrow, slurred speech, inability to walk. One of the victims talks about her husband, the skin started to slough off off his back. If you're born with congenital Minamata disease, many of those children were completely disabled.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Sort of like locked in. They could still react to some degree. That's one of the most dramatic cases in both the Sugimoto film. And then later in the Leavitt's film is the story of this, young woman, Tomoko. This is the very famous photograph of Tomoko Kanemaru of the congenital, I mean, a victim who's being bathed by her mother.

00;18;14;20 - 00;18;38;03

Darryl  Flaherty

And so it's completely devastating in the film begins with this story like it's all about the patients, and it begins with the patients in their experience and goes to the hospital where they're being rehabilitated. Some patients were able to be rehabilitated in the sense that they could participate in life to the degree. But others, they discussed how, in comparison to someone with cerebral palsy, that the minimal to patients, they couldn't do math.

00;18;38;06 - 00;18;44;00

Darryl  Flaherty

There was no possibility for development. I mean, that's the kind of devastating thing about the disease.

00;18;44;03 - 00;18;48;15

Jonathan Hafetz

And so the company effectively denies or tries to avoid responsibility.

00;18;48;20 - 00;19;09;09

Darryl  Flaherty

Totally denied responsibility at every level. And the horrible and diabolic thing about all of this, and there's a kind of tragic figure at the heart of this. And this is why, I mean, about the in the Japanese literature, if you think about environmental pollution cases or legal cases in Japan, it's lumped together with three other cases. The Minnesota folks are actually the second to litigate.

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Darryl  Flaherty

Well, they were the last to litigate of the four major pollution cases. And so the first major pollution case, litigation case lawsuit that was brought was actually called the negative. I mean, the Manta case, in other words, Nunavut becomes the name for, in effect, the symptoms of methylmercury poisoning. But the negative folks were very eager to bring their case.

00;19;28;11 - 00;19;45;25

Darryl  Flaherty

They lived downriver from a factory, so they didn't live in the factory town. There was no division within their community. They were like, this has already been happening over here. And this other place, I mean, the month of they actually went to Minnesota to talk to the Minnesota victims. And so they brought a lawsuit in 1967. So they were very early to bring the lawsuit.

00;19;45;25 - 00;20;06;18

Darryl  Flaherty

The Minnesota lawsuit case comes forth out of these four cases. So the negate the methylmercury poisoning is the first. There was another case which was, an asthma case which was finding a huge petrochemical and other factory site. It's called Yokai Aichi. It's near Nagoya. And that was another lawsuit. And then there was a suit of cadmium poisoning called in Japanese, itai itai, which means it hurts.

00;20;06;18 - 00;20;28;18

Darryl  Flaherty

It hurts, it hurts, it hurts disease. Cadmium poisoning makes your joints, makes your whole body ache, but particularly your joints. But the Minnesota case is interesting because it has so many different elements. And one of them is, as you're saying, what about the factory response? They had a doctor working in the factory who knew and had done tests on cats, where he had fed the cat's food that had been laced with the effluent.

00;20;28;18 - 00;20;46;13

Darryl  Flaherty

And there's a very famous cat, number 400. Initially he was giving them all these other kinds of water with heavy metal in it, cadmium and these other kinds of things, manganese and whatever else. And then finally he gave them the methylmercury, and it reproduced the symptoms that they were seeing in humans. And so he concluded, this is the source of the issue.

00;20;46;13 - 00;21;26;28

Darryl  Flaherty

And this is this happened again in 1959. In court testimony, he said, you know, I notified the engineers in part to believe that within the Japanese company, they did not inform the superiors, but they stopped all investigation after that. Also, the Kumamoto University began investigate as well. And as it became clear to others that methylmercury was the cause for this, the company engaged, along with the chemical association and in conjunction with both prefecture political authorities and the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, all sort of engaged in this campaign of obfuscation where they said, oh, maybe this is one of the most outlandish claims was, oh, these are chemicals from unexploded munitions from World War

00;21;26;28 - 00;21;50;27

Darryl  Flaherty

Two bombs that are lying in the bottom of the bay. That was the most outlandish claim. But other claims, again, as I've mentioned before, that it could be just some existing heavy metals in the water or some other cause and in the other pollution cases as well. The argument was made, oh, this is lifestyle choices. And you see this in environmental litigation, the claims that it's the person's lifestyle or some other cause that has nothing to do with the factory.

00;21;50;27 - 00;22;03;08

Darryl  Flaherty

So the factory denied all claims, even though it knew that it was producing methylmercury, that it was releasing it into the environment. In retrospect, there's a lot of scholarship suggesting that they absolutely would have known from pretty early time.

00;22;03;11 - 00;22;20;15

Jonathan Hafetz

And the scene in the Levittown movie between the head of Shiso and Smith, Eugene Smith, but by Johnny Depp, where he confronts him and you can see that the shiso hat is lying and basically tries to pay Smith off. That kind of crystallized this level of denial and corruption within the corporation.

00;22;20;18 - 00;22;34;24

Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, I think that was for dramatic effect. I've actually looked to see if that ever happened or if there's any evidence that that ever happened, because I was really curious about that, and I found no evidence that that happened. It might have, and maybe I haven't looked firmly enough. I'm not a Eugene Smith expert, but, there was definitely, absolutely corruption.

00;22;34;24 - 00;22;57;11

Darryl  Flaherty

And the thing that did happen was that he was brutally assaulted by I mean, they talk about company goons or company thugs. There's some question where these company employees, were they Japanese gangsters? Who were these people? But there's no question that he was assaulted and suffered severe damage. He lost vision in one of his eyes and suffered severe nerve damage such that he could not take pictures anymore.

00;22;57;14 - 00;23;19;09

Darryl  Flaherty

In the Leavitt's movie, he takes the famous Tomoko come in for a picture after having been beaten. That actually happened right before for dramatic effect. But there's absolutely a level of depravity on the part of the corporation, and that's the point for it's Akimoto and for the activists, is to really frame this as a question of I mean, it's not just a question of torts.

00;23;19;09 - 00;23;40;14

Darryl  Flaherty

It's not just a question of financial compensation. They want recognition of the sort of crimes committed against their community, against the environment, against their idealized notion of traditional Japan, against family life. And it's, you know, fair enough. I mean, they say, you know, this is a war. You have to stand up and fight. This is in the modern movie.

00;23;40;17 - 00;24;01;06

Darryl  Flaherty

This is when they go to Flower Festival in Kagoshima, which is one of the larger cities near, I mean, the matter. And there's this flower festival, and they're soliciting contributions for the legal fight, and they're shouting, you know, stand up to the corporate powers, and they're not getting a lot of traction in that scene, because folks, I think don't want to look at that and minimart as far from them.

00;24;01;06 - 00;24;08;14

Darryl  Flaherty

And so they would rather forget or not realize. But yeah, but the corporation is absolutely depraved and corrupt in this story.

00;24;08;17 - 00;24;12;19

Jonathan Hafetz

And then there's the government, right. You refer to it. The local prefectural authorities.

00;24;12;25 - 00;24;33;07

Darryl  Flaherty

Have to go back to the actually the town. So the mayor, the mayor of the town during much of this episode was the guy who invented the process. It's creating acetal aldehyde. He invented the process or refined the process and implemented it. He was an engineer at shiso and then became the mayor. But he was the implementer innovator that brought that process to the factory that created the methylmercury.

00;24;33;07 - 00;24;39;28

Darryl  Flaherty

And he was the mayor for at least three terms. So for much of this episode. So yes, it starts in the town and then you go to the prefecture. Sure. Yeah.

00;24;40;01 - 00;24;41;16

Jonathan Hafetz

What responsibility did the government have?

00;24;41;18 - 00;24;59;28

Darryl  Flaherty

So it's interesting to compare. And there is an another case in Shizuoka. So as a prefecture, you had the authority and the capacity to, say to company, stop processing, shut down the wastewater, and we're going to do a study, and then we'll proceed. And that did happen. And she's okay. Like, right. Concurrent with this, the mini incident wasn't methylmercury poisoning.

00;24;59;28 - 00;25;21;15

Darryl  Flaherty

It was another episode. But there was the prefectural, regulatory, you know, there was regulatory authority in the prefecture to engage in that under existing pollution law at the time was the factory effluent law. It's like 1850s, 1857 or something like that. So there was, legal authority for local folks to do that in Kumamoto Prefecture, which is the prefecture that Minamata is located.

00;25;21;15 - 00;25;39;23

Darryl  Flaherty

And they did something a little different. They wrote to the government and said, what do you think we should do here? The central government and the central government wrote back under pressure from the Ministry of International Trade Industry, that there was no clear evidence that there was a cause. They should caution people not to eat fish from the bay, but that there was no need to do a study.

00;25;39;25 - 00;26;05;17

Darryl  Flaherty

And the key thing about that early factory effluent law was they required that in the regulation of factory activity, that one harmonize economic interests of the national government and national state with the environmental concern. So that was one of the principles of the early law. That gets changed later in the 1967 Basic Pollution Law, which is and refined and strengthened later in 1970, what was called the pollution diet.

00;26;05;17 - 00;26;23;29

Darryl  Flaherty

So we see dramatic shift later once the litigation begins. But in this earlier moment, they had the authority, if they wanted to, to shut down, she sold, but they wouldn't because she saw was the major employer. Initially, Kumamoto University did research studies, but again, they had a change of president and then the new president shut down those studies.

00;26;23;29 - 00;26;37;13

Darryl  Flaherty

For a while, there was a lack of studying of the effects of the effluent as well. So the government was reaching in all these different areas, both in the study and then also in the regulation. So they had the authority, they didn't use it. And that was one of the infuriating things for the folks. I mean, about the.

00;26;37;16 - 00;26;41;29

Jonathan Hafetz

Well, in Japan. Right. Can you explain in terms of their close relationship in government and business? Yeah.

00;26;42;05 - 00;27;04;07

Darryl  Flaherty

So it's government, business politicians as well. So the Liberal Democratic Party was very much involved as well. And so Kadin Ran is the National Federation of Businesses. There's also the Chemical Producer Association. The government established committees to examine and explore these issues and set standards. And those were the parties that were on those committees. There was an activist representation that would mean the matter suffers on those committees.

00;27;04;13 - 00;27;22;09

Darryl  Flaherty

And so from the 50s through the 60s, there were episodic discussions and committees to explore how to respond to pollution in Japan. And in most cases, well, in all cases, they said, you know, we should harmonize economic interests with environmental concerns, which basically meant that economic interests came first.

00;27;22;12 - 00;27;24;16

Jonathan Hafetz

And so meanwhile, the mercury is still coming in.

00;27;24;22 - 00;27;43;05

Darryl  Flaherty

So 1959, they said, we've installed this thing the later capital C, we could drink the water out of it. It's clear everything's fine. We've paid you. You're and this is the most horrifying thing of it in the most infuriating thing, you know, the companies said, oh, everything's fine. We're going to go back to business as usual. But still, people are being born with General Minamata.

00;27;43;06 - 00;28;00;26

Darryl  Flaherty

Still people are suffering from the consumption. So the and they also said, well, recommend, you know, you don't eat the fish from the, the water that was before. But then after they installed the site later in 1959, the idea was that the water was clean now and they had also moved the outflow from one bay to the mean no matter river.

00;28;01;03 - 00;28;32;16

Darryl  Flaherty

And so this was now poisoning other villages. You had to think about the geography, the mean of the factory is south of the Minamoto River. There's a sea there called this Year of New York, and then the southern part of the Shira Nueces, this bay, that's where the major concentration was before that was where the pipe was. The effluent flowed out of there, and then they just redirected the pipe to the north and thought, oh, it'll be fewer parts per million if we flow it into the river, but it just diffused it into these other communities to the north now, so communities to the south.

00;28;32;16 - 00;28;40;05

Darryl  Flaherty

And then also further out there's an island in the bay, and they were communities on the island as well that were affected and saw incidents.

00;28;40;08 - 00;28;56;15

Jonathan Hafetz

I was struck by one of the quotes from one of the victims in the Sugimoto documentary, which is a desire to look deep inside the state, see where it's crooked, see where it's straight, and then discover through, what she hopes to discover through a trial, which I guess maybe leads into some of the litigation.

00;28;56;18 - 00;29;15;01

Darryl  Flaherty

I'm laughing. Smiling? Because that's the series quote from the movie that I mean, that's just a powerful, powerful clue in the sense, though she's saying it's a powerful indictment. She's like, I want to see where it's crooked and where it's straight. There aren't very many straight places in this story, and you know that she knows that. And that's the kind of heartbreak of it as well.

00;29;15;04 - 00;29;25;09

Jonathan Hafetz

And so the litigation continues right into the 60s and 70s, even through today. I know there were, you know, a couple of Supreme Court kids in 2004. So what happens with the litigation around, you know, matter?

00;29;25;14 - 00;29;45;20

Darryl  Flaherty

So again, I mean, to the folks there, again, because of the dynamic, just to scroll it back a little bit, like why were they so reluctant? I mean, there was a powerful push against them, not just from the factory, not just from the business community. And they were sure they were ostracized and seen this contagious in the beginning, still ostracized and discriminated against after it was realized it wasn't contagious.

00;29;45;20 - 00;30;12;06

Darryl  Flaherty

So that even continued. But there was also a powerful movement against them from the enterprise union. The unions. Unions in Japan are called enterprise unions, so they're tied to individual company. And so the unions came out and and were, you know, demonstrating against them act of trying to suppress any kind of litigation and pushing people into the conciliation process where Minamata was willing to pay these small dollar sums and then call it a day.

00;30;12;08 - 00;30;33;20

Darryl  Flaherty

And so that was the big driver of the reluctance. But in 69, they finally brought suit. A small group of of, folks brought suit. They derided other people. So there was the direct action folks, which I think they probably respected. I mean, those people were very confrontational. And the leader of that group, I think he goes unnamed in both the moto and the livid.

00;30;33;22 - 00;30;51;00

Darryl  Flaherty

They all have fake names in the test movie, which I think is unfortunate because we kind of know who these people are supposed to be like. But the character and it's the son of the the lead Japanese actor, he's supposed to be Carlo Moto Teruel, who was the activist leader of one of the patients groups, Direct Action Group.

00;30;51;00 - 00;31;14;13

Darryl  Flaherty

He was all about confronting the factory. But then we get this litigation in 1969, and so they brought a lawsuit. In the grounds was article 709 of the Japanese Civil Code, which says if you intentionally or negligently harm someone, then you, you know, you should compensate them. And so that was the legal basis. And so the critical thing in this trial was they had to prove causality to the causation of harm.

00;31;14;15 - 00;31;34;25

Darryl  Flaherty

Then they had to prove either negligence or intentionality. And then the other legal issue was there's a statute of limitations for this matter, for a tort was three years. So this was now, well, after the realization ten years and more after initial realization. So, you know, did it fall within the statute of limitations? And so that was the legal case.

00;31;34;25 - 00;31;40;19

Darryl  Flaherty

It was brought in a Kumamoto district court in 1969. So that was when we see the first litigation.

00;31;40;22 - 00;31;52;12

Jonathan Hafetz

I mean, it's stunning this from a US perspective that you have this long from when, you know, there was evidence fishing that, that it was polluting the water actually to go to court because I guess there was the reparations process in the middle. Yeah, that delayed it.

00;31;52;12 - 00;32;06;01

Darryl  Flaherty

And then there was also another process that emerged. And it gets very complicated and people would move. I mean, it's not sort of like that. You can slice everyone up into a different group, like someone might well, there was the one group that didn't really engage in activism at all. The so called leave it to the others group.

00;32;06;01 - 00;32;22;26

Darryl  Flaherty

And they were sort of derided. And then there were the folks who signed, starting in 1959, this is when I said there are about 6 or 7 of these agreements between different groups of people who were newly certified. And so what happened was the methylmercury was still present in the environment from 59 to 69. And people were also.

00;32;22;26 - 00;32;45;07

Darryl  Flaherty

This is another horrifying thing that people realized through the history of Minamata disease. People imagined or thought that the placenta was a bulwark against disease from mother to child. And it was through Minamoto that medicine discovered that, no, actually, the placenta would concentrate the meaning that was in the mother's body and then give it all to the child in one sort of massive dose with devastating effect.

00;32;45;07 - 00;33;10;07

Darryl  Flaherty

So there were continually people coming forward. I think the numbers are now that they're almost 10,000 people that have been, you know, afflicted by, by Minamata, by the effects of methylmercury poisoning in Myanmar today. And so the initial numbers were like 70, 80, 101, ten. And so we we get a continuing number. And so, yeah, that as people came forward, became increasingly clear that this was a big issue, big concern, a devastating concern.

00;33;10;07 - 00;33;15;03

Darryl  Flaherty

And yes, the the conciliation payments deleted. But finally people brought a suit.

00;33;15;05 - 00;33;18;19

Jonathan Hafetz

And just the corporation ever take responsibility.

00;33;18;21 - 00;33;46;10

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. So the suit itself is interesting. You know, you had the question of causality. Like if we just could just talk briefly about like the, the law itself as it was applied, the, the minimum the case came after. So they brought the suit in 1969 while they were suing the the negative, the mercury poisoning case was resolved. And so they pretty much used the findings from that case to shape the decision in the in the meat no matter methylmercury poisoning case on causality.

00;33;46;10 - 00;34;05;27

Darryl  Flaherty

It was quite clear she was pumping methylmercury into the environment. They had determined that methyl mercury is the cause for this disease. They plotted all of the cases they had. The Hosokawa testified, the doctor, the sort of tragic figure he was actually on his deathbed. And they had, you know, the the sort of ailing doctor came forward and said, you know, yes, the minimart was producing this and that.

00;34;05;27 - 00;34;26;23

Darryl  Flaherty

There was a clear tie between the methylmercury poisoning and the Minamata disease. They had an engineer from the Minnesota factory who came and also testified that the process created methylmercury. So for causality, it was quite clear that the court said, yes, we consider that you've caused this disease. They said there's no intentionality. So that was one finding. But then on negligence, they established a pretty high standard.

00;34;26;26 - 00;34;43;20

Darryl  Flaherty

They said that you're a chemical company putting out effluent into the water. And so you have they said you should pay attention to what you're doing, and we're going to hold you to a very high standard. The company said, oh, we couldn't have foreseen any of this. We didn't know. And the court said, no, no, no, we have this evidence from the doctor.

00;34;43;20 - 00;35;00;11

Darryl  Flaherty

We have this evidence that you knew the site later wouldn't remove methylmercury from the water. So the court was pretty hard and pretty damning. The verdict was very damning, in relationship that she saw on the question of negligence, the verdict said that chemical companies and factories in general have a very high standard of care to pay attention.

00;35;00;11 - 00;35;13;05

Darryl  Flaherty

They were like, you know, birds were falling out of the sky, that fish were floating in the water. If you are the chemical factor, you have to inquire. Sort of the quote for that is, you know, you must do continuous research is what they said. You can't just say, oh, we did a study 20 years ago and we don't.

00;35;13;09 - 00;35;35;17

Darryl  Flaherty

That's fine. So they found negligence. And then on the statute of limitations, they said, well, the burden of the methylmercury poisoning and that people continually discovered the degradation of their capabilities. And so this sort of stretches out the statute of limitations and makes them culpable even to this late date. So the initial finding in 1973 was the Kumamoto District Court ruling.

00;35;35;22 - 00;35;59;12

Darryl  Flaherty

And it was in a sense, you know, total victory for the Minamoto patients. They were compensated again. They weren't compensated to the degree that was satisfying to them. And you often hear this people say, oh, it's not about the money. But if you watch the documentary, you can see that it's not about the money. I mean, the documentary focuses on not the court process, but the one shareholder process for the direct negotiation movement.

00;35;59;12 - 00;36;21;10

Darryl  Flaherty

And those people all bought shares in Shiso Company, went to the shareholder meeting, and they wore the garb of Buddhist supplicants and Buddhist pilgrimages. There were hats that said, we are the minimart, the sickness pilgrimage group, and they all sat and chanted Buddhist prayers during the shareholder meeting. And there was mayhem at the meeting. Not that they didn't create the mayhem, but their supporters.

00;36;21;10 - 00;36;41;17

Darryl  Flaherty

Student activists rushed in and created mayhem in the meeting, so they needed support, financial support to live and survive. But I can't say they were gladdened. It's a classic thing in Japanese court cases for someone to come out and they do this in the Levitas film to come out with the sign that says, you know, we won the litigation, they pull out a scroll, it's got big character scroll, and they pull it out and it says, you know, we won the litigation.

00;36;41;17 - 00;36;59;13

Darryl  Flaherty

And they do that in the Levitz movie. And there's a kind of moment. It's a poignant moment in that movie, but there's no sort of celebration. As you see, one of the characters, she grabs the Chisolm head of the whole corporation. She grabs him by the lapels, the shareholder meeting, and screams in his face and says, you know, you came and prayed at my family altar.

00;36;59;16 - 00;37;18;20

Darryl  Flaherty

You know you. You've come and stood next to me and you, but, you know, taking responsibility. And you get gets back to your question. Did they ever take responsibility? Yes. They apologized after the court found so strongly against them. Then they said, yes, our bad. We apologize. They stopped putting Mercury into I mean, I'm to be in 1968.

00;37;18;22 - 00;37;39;05

Darryl  Flaherty

And then their argument was and now it's all over. The court is running against us. We're going to pay you. We apologize. Story is over, and that's it. But it wasn't it because continually, people came forward with an amount of poisoning and demanded to be certified. They were refused. The government created a pollution board that was supposed to resolve these kinds of questions.

00;37;39;08 - 00;37;59;24

Darryl  Flaherty

It was a little bit more stringent, and people would have liked activists would have liked this suit again in 1984, there was a suit against the government that said it was wrong for both Kumamoto Prefecture and Minamoto not to enforce that factory effluent law that I mentioned before. Under which they could have done something. And so there was a lawsuit basically saying you could have done something, and other people did.

00;37;59;26 - 00;38;13;21

Darryl  Flaherty

And ultimately, the court found that the government had failed to enforce that law. So there was a settlement in that case. And there are cases that continue now, mostly around certifications. If you go to me, no matter if you get off the train at MIT about the station, the right in the town and step off the train to walk down the street.

00;38;13;22 - 00;38;21;01

Darryl  Flaherty

One of the first buildings is a law office, and it says we'll take up cases related to the matter. And she took to Sugimoto.

00;38;21;01 - 00;38;40;14

Jonathan Hafetz

The movie comes out in 1970. What doe still do given the trajectory? Yeah. Little of all this goes on to make more films about the town, the pollution. What was the significance of his films at the time or within the overall picture? What's going on for trying to get justice to compensation?

00;38;40;17 - 00;38;58;24

Darryl  Flaherty

I think it's because of the city motto that if you say meaning matter to someone in Japan, they know what you're talking about there. So there were, as I mentioned before, there were these four pollution cases. If you said yokai. Keiichi, I don't think someone's going to think environmental litigation or environmental law or environmental suffering. If you say Niigata, no one's going to think environmental litigation.

00;38;58;26 - 00;39;17;19

Darryl  Flaherty

These are the other sites where there were these famous cases, you know. So if you say those other places, you know, someone's not going to think, oh, pollution litigation. If you say Minamata in Japan, everyone knows me no matter. And it's it's a kind of curse for the town itself. The population of the town was around 50,000 at its height in, you know, the 1950s, early 1960s.

00;39;17;21 - 00;39;37;16

Darryl  Flaherty

It's now dropped to 20,000. It's a problem in most small Japanese villages. Remote villages have seen the population. We can't say that that's just because of this story. But other places can try to marshal the lovely scenery that they have or something like that, and try to turn themselves into a tourist destination. That's not a possibility for Minamata in the future.

00;39;37;22 - 00;39;53;29

Darryl  Flaherty

It's a lovely place. The bay is beautiful. The way the light hits the water, it's extraordinary. It's a beautiful place. And I want to stress the Levitan movie is not shot in Myanmar. It's even more beautiful than the Croatian town or village or wherever they shot that. But it's I mean, it's just extraordinary. I mean, the matter is.

00;39;53;29 - 00;40;02;21

Darryl  Flaherty

And so but they are never going to be able to capitalize on that until this is sorted out and it's not sorted out even now. So, I think you ask me a question in there. Well, I.

00;40;02;21 - 00;40;05;04

Jonathan Hafetz

Was just asking about the significance of the film.

00;40;05;06 - 00;40;23;22

Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, in a sense, it brought forward this issue. So now, I mean, the matter is the totemic. Like, if you say, I mean, no matter, that means environmental poisoning, environmental negation. The film did that. And then also Eugene Smith in his, in the photography, I mean, brought this forward, you know, it's right around the same time we have, you know, Rachel Carson and people thinking about environmental movements and, destruction of the environment.

00;40;23;28 - 00;40;44;05

Darryl  Flaherty

We mentioned Eugene Smith. We also have to mention his wife. It was a shared project in the movie, Aileen Smith shows up and sort of seduces him into doing this, meeting them at the photo shoot. They had actually worked together previously on an exhibit of his at the Jewish Museum in 1970. So together they sort of pitched this out, the photo shoot project and went there together.

00;40;44;05 - 00;41;03;12

Darryl  Flaherty

And it was a shared. It was a shared project with the two of them, I would suggest. And she's still involved in environmental activism. I mean, now you have the UN, there's the UN Convention on methylmercury poisoning. In 2018. They held the meeting in Minnesota. So, I mean, Minnesota is the when people think environmental poisoning, they think Minamata.

00;41;03;14 - 00;41;04;29

Darryl  Flaherty

So it's synonymous.

00;41;05;02 - 00;41;15;23

Jonathan Hafetz

And so and Smith so he's this famed very well known photojournalist. Right. And he's sort of idiosyncratic. He does his photo essay, which seems, you know, like very impactful, right?

00;41;15;25 - 00;41;34;24

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. I think in the movie it's interesting, the movie, one of the characters says to him, you know, people wouldn't be paying attention if you weren't here. And there is also that element. There are a lot of layers to how and whether people are going to pay attention. And there were lots of folks trying to bring attention to what was happening in Myanmar in the late 60s into the early 70s.

00;41;34;26 - 00;41;53;20

Darryl  Flaherty

And Eugene Smith was absolutely one of them and critical in that process, and that not just the photo shoot, the spread. I mean, all those images, if you think about me, know much of their iconic images. There's a pipe that is the pipe at which the effluent flowed into the there's Minamata Bay, but then there's like a little sort of inlet, the Siachen Inlet.

00;41;53;26 - 00;42;12;09

Darryl  Flaherty

And that's where the pipe was flowing. And you got that photo and the photos of people's twisted hands and twisted feet and shrunken hands and feet and, you know, they couldn't move their bodies. And so the kind of suffering that came along with that, and he's a I mean, he's an interesting character also. I mean, if you listen to the book, I mean, the movie is based on a book.

00;42;12;09 - 00;42;34;20

Darryl  Flaherty

The book is called me. Also, it's written by, Eugene Smith and Alan Smith. It really captures the moments of joy and perseverance and happiness, like when the folks, you know, when they're taking it's a sort down moment in between soliciting support for their their legal case and going to cost and challenge the company executives, they sort of relax and enjoy themselves.

00;42;34;20 - 00;42;56;03

Darryl  Flaherty

And there's that sort of humanity, too. And Smith seems like was a kind of character, idiosyncratic, for sure. I mean, this kind of quirky guy who, Aileen Smith described as sort of fitting into Japanese society almost seamlessly, even though he was he had taken photos during World War Two. In Okinawa as a photojournalist.

00;42;56;06 - 00;42;58;14

Jonathan Hafetz

And what happens to Smith, you know, after the essay is published?

00;42;58;20 - 00;43;21;23

Darryl  Flaherty

So they stayed in Japan until from 1971 to 1974 or so. Together they separated. And as a result of the separation, legally, they said that the surviving party would get the copyright to all of the photographs. She had also taken a number of photographs, which appear in some in the book Minamata, that came out in some of the exhibitions that they did together, and so he eventually went back to the United States.

00;43;21;23 - 00;43;44;08

Darryl  Flaherty

I believe she remained in Japan, she wrote. She remains an activist around environmental issues. But Smith passed away in 1978. There was the book Minamata that came out in 1975. They separated shortly after that, and then, he died in 1978. I mean, I sort of playfully wrote, it's Johnny Depp playing Eugene Smith in the movie, and I sort of playfully wrote it instead of the Jack Sparrow, like the sort of older Jack Sparrow.

00;43;44;08 - 00;44;04;16

Darryl  Flaherty

But the movie characterizes him. I mean, he's always drinking, but he had suffered so many injuries during the time that he was a photojournalist in wartime. And supposedly, you know, his mouth had been exploded. He had no hard palate, he had no teeth, basically had full dentures. So he was always evidently, according to Aileen Smith, he was always in pain.

00;44;04;18 - 00;44;23;11

Darryl  Flaherty

And so alcohol was just how he self-medicated. Yeah. Very sympathetic. I mean, just a very sympathetic person. And he wasn't old. He was 51. I don't think of that as old at this point in my life. But, and he says in the, in the Leavitt's movie, my body is older than I am, which I think that was absolutely true.

00;44;23;11 - 00;44;29;14

Darryl  Flaherty

And then that was accelerated by the violence visited on him, by the Cheeto thugs, the beat down that he received.

00;44;29;20 - 00;44;50;17

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. It was a brutal beating. I mean, I mean, both movies, right? This comes through the direct action and the violence. In one of his later movies, Sugimoto likens the sufferings of the mean amount of poisoning to the Tokugawa era rebels, their direct resistance, so to a struck by the direct resistance at the time, you know, Japanese protests in the 60s, 1970s.

00;44;50;20 - 00;45;08;23

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. I mean, oftentimes people are this image of Japanese people as being quiet, reserved, withdrawn or whatever. But you'll see if you watch particularly the Sugimoto documentary and the next one, they use the term ikki, which means uprising. And so the people who are the victims in these, this is to promote those term and they call themselves this the sufferers.

00;45;08;25 - 00;45;31;13

Darryl  Flaherty

I mean, they are coming forward and demanding that the company managers and executives take responsibility. In the Sugimoto documentary itself, the guy who the, octopus catcher guy says, you know, we should fill a keg with effluent water and make them all drink it. That's the kind of vengeance fantasy that a lot of these people I mean, they're really I suggested, you know, they have these moments of joy.

00;45;31;16 - 00;45;52;07

Darryl  Flaherty

It's a lot of feeling. There's a lot of pathos in that movie. We see the joy, and we also see the despair, the suffering, the fury. I mean, it's not just anger. It's like fury in one of the I think her name is, Sakamoto Matsuo. The one who whose quote you cited earlier, she's on the train going up to the one shareholder meeting, and she says, I don't know what's going to happen when I get there.

00;45;52;07 - 00;46;09;11

Darryl  Flaherty

I might lose my mind. I mean, she does lose her mind when she gets there, when she says, you know, I'm so upset and I can't wait to confront these guys. I might just lose it. And she does. It's interesting. I mean, thinking about the sort of social justice element and the law versus social activism and direct action.

00;46;09;13 - 00;46;35;14

Darryl  Flaherty

And there are a lot of scholars who've written about this in English and in Japanese, and many of them will stress the importance. And I think there is certainly an importance to create precedents, and that's how the law functions. But the lawyers themselves and the people involved in these litigations, that's not the most important thing for them. The most important thing for them in this process was that they confront the executives and executives, apologize, that the executives bow down before them.

00;46;35;14 - 00;46;58;25

Darryl  Flaherty

And it's a very Japanese style thing to do. Make a little triangle with your hands, get down on the floor and apologize and take responsibility. I had this quote I mentioned before of one of the lawyers. He said we failed in this case, not because of how much money we did or didn't get. He said, quote, in the next suit like this, whatever happens, the first rule should be to have the lawyers fully experienced and appreciate the life of the plaintiffs and other residents.

00;46;58;25 - 00;47;14;11

Darryl  Flaherty

In other words, we should move to the town and experience the suffering that they experience in their everyday lives. And that's what that's what a lawyer is saying. So that's kind of interesting to me. So and the plaintiffs themselves, the sufferers, I mean, they demand that and want that out of this process.

00;47;14;13 - 00;47;22;17

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. It seems different than some of the filmic versions of mass tort litigation. For example, in the US, lawyer driven in a different relationship with the community.

00;47;22;20 - 00;47;40;12

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. I mean, this is an Sugimoto that's really deliberate, I think. Right. So in the Sugimoto movie we see the factory, but we don't see any employee of the factory until at least the final third, if not the final quarter of the movie. They talk about it nonstop. Of course. They say what they want and they're angry and they're furious.

00;47;40;18 - 00;47;59;02

Darryl  Flaherty

And we see the factory in the background, in the foreground, and we see the gates and we see the towers and and they scream and they're shouting, and we see all of that, but we don't see the company head until the shareholders meeting. And he's really I mean, he says he has sympathy with them. He does not apologize in the the movie.

00;47;59;02 - 00;48;15;14

Darryl  Flaherty

In the elevator movie, we get an apology from the company head. But the true apology and the story in real life doesn't come until after the Kumamoto District Court verdict finding the company at fault. So that's what the people wanted. And yes, there there's a fury there for sure.

00;48;15;16 - 00;48;30;24

Jonathan Hafetz

To what extent? As you mentioned earlier, right, about sort of movement, you know, politics and there's an effort to have broader reform, right? Mental framing does the what happens? I mean, I'm out. Through the direct action, through the litigation, produce larger reform, environmental reform bill, I mean, about itself.

00;48;30;24 - 00;48;54;00

Darryl  Flaherty

So I would say 100%. So there are a lot of accounts from that time saying, you know, Japan is one of the most polluted countries in the world. There was this cooperation between there was the harmonization of so-called harmonization, which basically meant the free rein given to the companies to produce however they wanted. And so during prewar times in Japan, these kinds of disputes were usually resolved through conciliation.

00;48;54;06 - 00;49;14;17

Darryl  Flaherty

But also the challenges were simpler. So there wasn't there hadn't been this sort of petrochemical, the sort of second or third industrial revolution, how we want to think about it. But the petrochemical change where you get the bioaccumulation and there also wasn't the volume in terms of asthma inducing smog. And so in this later moment, the 50s and then in the 60s, all of that comes forward.

00;49;14;22 - 00;49;30;26

Darryl  Flaherty

And it's inescapable in places where there are these factories. And so there were some cases where someone could institute, for example, there was a factory where there was a complaint, and then they were able to put some catchment on their smokestacks and they were able to capture potash, which they could then use as a fertilizer. So there was a byproduct.

00;49;30;28 - 00;49;47;06

Darryl  Flaherty

And so it meant that their solution, their cleanup of the dust and the particulate matter that they were producing created something they could sell. And so the company was happy and the community was happy, and everything worked out great. And so there were some cases like that in Japan. But once we get into the 50s and 60s, that's not possible.

00;49;47;13 - 00;50;05;16

Darryl  Flaherty

And so the, the, the political officials came to realize and particularly this is something very savvy on the part of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, the Conservative Party, they recognized. Wow, this is we have to confront and challenge this issue. We have to recognize this issue. And so that's there was something called the pollution diet in 1970.

00;50;05;16 - 00;50;26;01

Darryl  Flaherty

So right around the time of all this litigation, and I would say that there's a direct relation causal relationship between the activism and litigation in these pollution cases, not just me, the matter, but the other ones as well, doesn't mean much. It doesn't really come into full fruition until after. But the beginning of the litigation, the activism of the minimal, the patient sufferers, they were very evident.

00;50;26;01 - 00;50;52;20

Darryl  Flaherty

They had a sit in outside the T. So gates was the direct negotiation group, and they also had a tent that they put outside of the shiso factory. So headquarters in Tokyo. And so they were omnipresent and inescapable, as were other folks engaged in activism for environmental controls. And so, you see the establishment of the strengthening of the Basic Pollution Law of 1967 and then the establishment of an environmental agency within the Prime Minister's Office in 1971.

00;50;52;22 - 00;51;18;02

Darryl  Flaherty

So you go from the sort of free rein for the factories to requirements that the chemical companies have. Not this nonsense psych later thing, but rather use a different process that doesn't produce methylmercury as a byproduct. It's more expensive, but they can produce plastics with this other process that doesn't produce real purity. So these kinds of transformations and that's the that's the shift in the early 1970s.

00;51;18;05 - 00;51;35;13

Darryl  Flaherty

And so there's a lot of hope and excitement. And again, it's fascinating that the LDP does that. That's a kind of very tiny thing on the part of the Liberal Democratic Party. But what they do then is later there's this moment of, oh, great, we want everyone's enthusiastic people believe that there's going to be change. And then that sort of devil is in the details kind of way.

00;51;35;13 - 00;51;59;12

Darryl  Flaherty

They sort of slow walk certification of new patients. The standard was to say that you had to have symptoms of Hunter Russell syndrome, which was the definition of how do we identify with you have the matter poisoning or not? I mean, you also had to have lived in these geographic areas that were affected. And so let's say your mother consumed all this methylmercury, then moved someplace else, and then you're a congenital patient.

00;51;59;15 - 00;52;10;10

Darryl  Flaherty

You would be denied and then you'd have to litigate or petition. So that's where we get the litigation trail coming out. In addition to the 1984 suit against the government.

00;52;10;13 - 00;52;29;03

Jonathan Hafetz

Fast forward and a little bit ahead, I we have 2011 the accident at Fukushima, one of the worst disasters in modern Japanese history, was nuclear incident since Chernobyl 1986. I mean, there anything in terms of the response to, to that? I mean, I'm, in terms of Japanese law, society mobilization.

00;52;29;06 - 00;53;02;09

Darryl  Flaherty

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And so one would hope that there would have been something different. I want to go back to one of the reactions. So there has been no study to show whether, I mean, I'm out the bay is clean now or not. So there was a dredging from 1980 to 1990 at great expense. They suctioned the sediment from the bottom of the bay, created a landfill, could have concrete barrier, capped it, with clean soil and then created with, you know, sort of ironically, they called the Echo Park ecology, Echo Park in English.

00;53;02;14 - 00;53;19;29

Darryl  Flaherty

And so why am I bringing this up in relation to Fukushima is they also built a net in this net was supposed to keep all of the contaminated fish. There's an enormous net that built in 1974. They're supposed to keep the contaminated fish in towards the bay. Well, that's kind of ridiculous. Like the net. It's not a very spine net.

00;53;20;02 - 00;53;39;18

Darryl  Flaherty

Then the fish can swim through the net. And everyone thought that this was the silliest thing ever. But this was a government reaction. And so in the Fukushima incident, there was a cloud. And so in the cloud the government through mapped the cloud in the government's cloud. And then the cloud that the scientists mapped was very different. There was a kind of cleared a lot line for the government.

00;53;39;18 - 00;54;01;02

Darryl  Flaherty

This was coming back to this net thinking like the government saying anything within this zone. It was affected negative by radioactivity. But anything outside of this line is clean and we don't have to worry about it. And also no comprehensive study. And so folks are concerned worried. And again they evacuated and completely excluded the population from the so-called affected zone.

00;54;01;05 - 00;54;28;21

Darryl  Flaherty

But then, you know, just across the fence, the idea was, well, this is completely contaminated, but just across this line that we've arbitrarily drawn here is totally clean. So for scientists, activists now, in the wake of Fukushima, there's a concern the lessons have not been learned. And there's also the question of covering up. Initially, folks talked about the triple disaster at Fukushima earthquake, tsunami and then meltdown, and then activists described actually there were four disasters.

00;54;28;21 - 00;55;02;22

Darryl  Flaherty

The the earthquake, tsunami meltdown and cover up is the fourth. So there was a concern, you know, that what has been learned, not a whole lot. And it's interesting about how lawyers aren't central to the minimart, the story as it's told. I don't think there's any lawyer in the Leavitt's film. And in the meantime, at the film, there's just one moment where it's the lawyer for the Cheeto Company, and a sounds the silent, and we see this guy walking around in the background, and there's a little subtitle in Japanese that says, Here's the Cheeto head attorney, former Supreme Court justice, and in the Levitt US film, no one's designated as a lawyer.

00;55;02;22 - 00;55;22;08

Darryl  Flaherty

And if you know the story and you've seen videos or photos of the episodes, there aren't lawyers present in the scenes that are presented in the Levitt movie. I don't think there are any lawyers in the Levitt House movie. So lawyers are not present. But lawyers were absolutely present. And so that's an interesting thing for me, having written a history of lawyers, like, where are the lawyers in this story?

00;55;22;11 - 00;55;44;16

Darryl  Flaherty

They're absolutely there. They were litigating this. I shared this quote. There's a quote from this other case, and the lawyers were absolutely present and involved, but they don't sort of figure too much as heroes, slightly as villains. So similarly, now lawyers, again, are on the ground doing extraordinary work in the Fukushima incident, trying to get compensation for people, recognition of harm from the radioactivity.

00;55;44;23 - 00;55;48;24

Darryl  Flaherty

But again, the story doesn't often, highlight the work that they do.

00;55;48;26 - 00;55;55;22

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah, it's a very interesting contrast, I think, about the movie and don't make versions of US litigation where the lawyers sort of place the central.

00;55;55;25 - 00;56;14;14

Darryl  Flaherty

I think lawyers are always the key characters in the in America. Like you've done civil action, right? Or, you know, if we think about Mark Ruffalo of Dark Waters and if you think about Erin Brockovich, it's I mean, this it's basically a law firm story, any sort of filmic representation. The lawyers are the main characters, either as heroes or villains.

00;56;14;17 - 00;56;35;16

Darryl  Flaherty

And this is not that kind of story. I mean, the Eugene Smith story is a redemption story, personal redemption through his encounter with the victims. And that's they call themselves that. And that's the term that, Sugimoto uses the victims in their world. But, I mean, they're really, I would say survivors. I mean, these are people with perseverance.

00;56;35;16 - 00;56;56;12

Darryl  Flaherty

They have so much extraordinary grit. They have grace in front of this extraordinary devastation in their personal lives. And it's the encounter with that. Eugene Smith was suicidal. Aileen talks about that and Smith talks about that. And so he sort of, you know, was given a new life through the encounter with these people and their experience even in all of its suffering.

00;56;56;15 - 00;57;11;04

Darryl  Flaherty

And so that's the story that's being told, not the story of lawyers, which is to dry or to reductive because they're trying to get out of the narrative of the materialist world or saying, let's get back to nature, let's get back to another Japan. That's not materialist.

00;57;11;06 - 00;57;13;19

Jonathan Hafetz

And the emphasis on apology as well.

00;57;13;21 - 00;57;33;20

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah, they want they want something much, much more than you can get in a courtroom. And we didn't mention this. I mean, she so has been required to make extraordinary payments. I believe one of the estimates is about what is it about $80 million. And what's happened is the government is basically subsidized. She so, to in order to afford to make these payments.

00;57;33;20 - 00;57;55;28

Darryl  Flaherty

And so it's this kind of strange thing, like basically the principle in the revised basic pollution law is that the polluter pays and so that was one of the features coming out of the 1970 pollution diet was that, the polluter will pay, but in reality the taxpayer pays because the government's subsidize. So through all kinds of loans and tax forbearance and all this kind of thing.

00;57;56;05 - 00;58;17;03

Darryl  Flaherty

And so in the end, in part, the taxpayer pays. So that's another kind of weird, twisted thing. I mean, she so is still present, still functioning and meaning if it wasn't there, there would be nothing in Minnesota in terms of industry. It doesn't pollute the bay anymore. But they haven't done the study. And so no comprehensive study. There have been some studies, but they're all very piecemeal.

00;58;17;05 - 00;58;27;27

Darryl  Flaherty

And many of them show that the methylmercury concentrations are still quite high in Myanmar to be worryingly high. So the bay has been dredged, but it's not fully clean.

00;58;28;04 - 00;58;29;20

Jonathan Hafetz

And that's frightening.

00;58;29;22 - 00;58;49;18

Darryl  Flaherty

It's a huge concern. And also there's still a resistance for people to say, I'm suffering from methylmercury poisoning. So there's this idea that the chapter's closed. The town would like to close the chapter. She so would like to close the chapter. And it's interesting. There's a government supported museum there, and it's kind of like, oh, the world can learn.

00;58;49;18 - 00;59;06;13

Darryl  Flaherty

And we are on the frontier of understanding and explaining methylmercury poisoning and bioaccumulation. And we are done with this and now we will teach you. But at the same time, there continue to be people who say, oh, I'm, I suffer as a result of methylmercury in the bay.

00;59;06;13 - 00;59;11;29

Jonathan Hafetz

And the degree of activism in Japan today seems much less than it was in the 70s. Yes.

00;59;12;01 - 00;59;29;24

Darryl  Flaherty

Dramatic reduction. So coming out of World War two, there was this I mean, this is me as a historian talking now, and it'll interrupt any moment. But, you know, coming out of World War Two, there were all the promises of rights in the new constitution. And so it was this moment of possibility. And people felt like they should seize that moment.

00;59;29;26 - 00;59;50;08

Darryl  Flaherty

But during the occupation, there was also the so-called reverse course. So were the United States government rehabilitated folks who were conservatives, some war criminals and so on. And that was the beginning of the Liberal Democratic Party and conservatism and that kind of thing. So there was this tension, and it really came to a head in 1960 with the riots around the diet building against the US-Japan security alliance.

00;59;50;08 - 01;00;08;23

Darryl  Flaherty

And so I would say from 1945 through that moment, there was a kind of combust ability about Japanese society, I would suggest, and there was a lot of engagement, a lot of street politics. And it was in the language of, citizens of the Crimean dandy. One of the Minamoto groups is the Citizens Committee from the town that felt guilty.

01;00;08;26 - 01;00;27;19

Darryl  Flaherty

It gets very complicated. I mean, there were many, many different groups and subgroups and factions or whatever. But there's one group. They felt guilty, the townspeople who felt guilty that they had stood by and not engaged. And so they took on this mantle and they were called the mean. No matter. She mean, they weren't victims, they weren't sufferers, but they were like allies, is what we would call them, I guess, in the 21st century.

01;00;27;26 - 01;00;46;17

Darryl  Flaherty

So there were all these kinds of different groups and, yeah, all overlapping and engaged and tied up to the Socialist and Communist Party, which I also didn't mention. But that's the Socialist and Communist Party were funding a lot of the lawyer groups, but the patients groups often doubt it. It sort of suspected them. They were suspicious of their involvement.

01;00;46;20 - 01;01;02;14

Darryl  Flaherty

You know, when you walk down the street, there's first that lawyer's office, then there's like the there's a social services thing run by the Communist Party, Communist Party affiliated social services office. And then there's a Catholic church and there is faith also Buddhism. We could have talked about, but it was very combustible in lots of movements. Not at all.

01;01;02;14 - 01;01;20;04

Darryl  Flaherty

Now, I mean, if you were engaged in a movement activity like that, and even in that moment. So after 1960, though, people begin to move towards what we think of as Japan now. And that's what philosopher, social critic, a guy named Hikaru Koro described as Econom ism. In other words, comfort and the desire to live in material comfort.

01;01;20;11 - 01;01;45;13

Darryl  Flaherty

And so people just sort of say, oh, you know, that's not that's not my problem. And walk down the street in Sugimoto, you see there on that street and there's the flower festival and they're shouting and no one's putting money in their box and everyone's walking by them or walking around them, and it captures. That's like the general reaction to women in other citizen movements in, Japan after, like, everyone suffered environmental pollution.

01;01;45;13 - 01;02;07;28

Darryl  Flaherty

Everyone. It's something that everyone experienced more broadly. And people were like, yeah, we should address this. And then after there was the pollution diet, some controls, the most obvious sources were controlled or limited. Then people were like, okay, it's solved now we can get on with it and enjoy increasing incomes. Summing up, what do you want to answer about is about the victims and about their experience and they're kind of extraordinary people.

01;02;07;28 - 01;02;23;10

Darryl  Flaherty

If you watch and he's sort of saying, you know, we shouldn't pity them. They have lives, they should be valued, they're human. And so to try to restore some of that humanity, I think for a Japanese audience, there's a lot of discrimination in Japan and in the rest of the world as well, towards people who have mental or physical disabilities.

01;02;23;10 - 01;02;45;04

Darryl  Flaherty

And he's saying we should cherish these people and value them beyond just the financial value. You know, they're important parts of the community, of their family. And so to celebrate that, and I think what the Smith movie shows is, on the one hand, is trying to make a point about universal suffering. And at the end, it's kind of a photo montage of all these other environmental cases, tragedies around the world.

01;02;45;07 - 01;03;06;07

Darryl  Flaherty

But for me, I think it works best as the movie about the kind of redemption of Eugene Smith, this figure who's, you know, yes, at the end, towards the end of his career and his whole thing. I mean, it's in his book, it comes out in the movie. Amy Smith in a later interview talks about this. She says, you know, he felt like he had obligation to both the viewer and the subject of his photographs, and that was his whole thing.

01;03;06;07 - 01;03;26;07

Darryl  Flaherty

That was his philosophy of photography. And I think the movie sort of captures that and that kind of idealism. That was typical of that time, the 1960s, early 1970s in the movie brought forward thinking about this kind of thing again. And I think that's the Levitas movie. That's also contribution.

01;03;26;10 - 01;03;43;16

Jonathan Hafetz

Yeah. They both interestingly, they both do the documentary. I call them of the documentary and then the Weather Ties movie, not so much the movie itself, but the photo journalism that was the subject of the movie. Interesting to see the role of, documenting can play in these types of situations. Oh.

01;03;43;18 - 01;04;01;17

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. I mean, they're both stories about storytelling. And so even though it's a story about storytelling, but where he lets the people tell it like he's listening, he lets the people tell their stories. And so the people then do tell their stories. I mean, there was that young boy who likes watching TV and then a woman. Maybe it's his mother.

01;04;01;19 - 01;04;22;17

Darryl  Flaherty

She says to him, you know, what about you? What about your future when you grow up? And it's a very poignant scene. He says in Japanese is dum dum. Sayonara. And that means it's bad. It's bad. Goodbye. And so you have this feeling of, I mean, he's such a energetic kid. I mean, it's just this young kid, and he's he doesn't have control over his body.

01;04;22;22 - 01;04;43;00

Darryl  Flaherty

He can barely sit up. He can barely see. Speech is very slurred. You can see that he has some sort of mental impairment, but he's able to communicate. He's alive, he has enthusiasms. And so where the movies sort of bring forward these personalities, they're really powerful. And I thought in the test movie, there's it opens when they arrive in Mina.

01;04;43;05 - 01;05;02;16

Darryl  Flaherty

The movie doesn't know. I mean, if we talk about the opening, I thought it was a very clever opening of the movie. We start there's the live performance of Tomoko being bathed by her mother. In the movie, her name is Akiko. And it turns out I learned later, listening to this interview with Aileen Smith, that she was bathe almost twice a day, so she was bathe all the time.

01;05;02;22 - 01;05;18;14

Darryl  Flaherty

So although that that was sort of staged, she was bathed a lot. And so, and so we get to the water for being splashed down in the water, and then it sort of transitions into the chemicals which Smith is using to develop the film, which then we learned later. And this is true or not, perhaps the chemicals.

01;05;18;14 - 01;05;39;12

Darryl  Flaherty

Exactly. Also, those kinds of chemicals are produced by Chie. So again, this what I'm saying the more you know about it, the more you can appreciate. And I'm quite certain that the director does not by accident that the movie opens that way. And so I thought that was very powerful. And then when we get to Mina Martin, it's almost one of these sort of truth, this stranger than fiction sort of scenes.

01;05;39;12 - 01;05;57;21

Darryl  Flaherty

There's this guy playing an accordion, and I thought that that was some they were taking liberty. I hadn't seen it in the Sugimoto documentary that this guy standing there playing an accordion. And it turns out there was a minimart, a patient who played the accordion and would go walk around the community and play the accordion. It seemed almost like a sort of absurdist Italian movie or something.

01;05;57;21 - 01;06;08;01

Darryl  Flaherty

And I was like, what? You know, what's going on here? So there was that as well. So the trying to bring forward the poignancy of these people's experiences that both movies do, that in powerful ways.

01;06;08;04 - 01;06;28;28

Jonathan Hafetz

I would highly recommend, you know, that people see both movies. You can see the Moto movie on the it's on the internet like a film archive site, which will provide, if you set your settings right, a translation to English, and then the Minamata is available for streaming on various sites. Yeah, I think they're both really well done. They provide vaccines into what happened to me and made it into Japan.

01;06;28;28 - 01;06;34;18

Jonathan Hafetz

And I think, as you said, kind of surprising and contrary to ideas that people have about Japan and Japanese society.

01;06;34;20 - 01;06;45;24

Darryl  Flaherty

Yeah. I mean, people taking action to confront injustice that they see in their everyday life at enormous risk to their social standing, mostly because they feel like they have no choice.

01;06;45;26 - 01;06;53;22

Jonathan Hafetz

Darrel, thanks so much for coming on. Great to have you. And, just your vast expertise on this subject. It's terrific to talk with you about both movies.

01;06;53;25 - 01;07;12;16

Darryl  Flaherty

Jonathan, thanks so much. And I teach me the matter. Actually, I do a post-World War Two class called, postwar Japan. So I've taught this film many times, so I was. So when you mentioned it, I was excited and I was delighted to be asked before I went to Japan over the summer, because I wouldn't have to confess, I would not have gone to otherwise.

01;07;12;22 - 01;07;24;24

Darryl  Flaherty

But going there, that really, I mean, it was powerful to walk the streets of Minamata and see just how it's still struggling to overcome this episode.