Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata DiseaseIn the early 1950s, numerous cases of organic mercury poisoning were discovered in the fishing villages around Minamata, Japan. Yet for decades after, victims of what is now known as Minamata disease suffered neglect, discrimination, and ostracism by Minamata residents, local government, labor unions, Minamata disease certification committees, and fishers' cooperatives. Fifty years later, renewed efforts began to conserve the environment and reconcile with victims of poisoning, including a flurry of museum-building, citizen waste recycling campaigns, and conferences, symposia, and exhibitions. But this rapprochement in the 1990s took place slowly and with difficulty, as the pain of previous decades was still alive and aching. Ishimure Michiko served as a key activist and spokesperson for the Minamata protest movement, producing over forty volumes of writings in various genres: docufiction, historical novels, reportage, autobiography, poetry, children's books, and a Nō drama. Beyond playing an outsized role in organizing the Minamata struggle, Ishimure influenced the movement's cultural history and memory and articulated its symbolic legacy. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow is a powerful record of victims' suffering and the movement to support them. Its lyrical descriptions of fishing villages and fishers' way of life, as well as of the scenic beauty of the Shiranui Sea area, are among the most effective in contemporary Japanese literature. Paradise is a work of testimonial resistance literature--a militant, hybrid autoethnography featuring both a local community as a plurality of speakers and an autobiographical voice through which Ishimure plays an unassuming participant observer who insists on the accuracy, truthfulness, and necessity of her testimony. |
Contents
Boat Cemetery | 67 |
November 2 1959 | 87 |
When Mud and Stones Were Thrown in Anger | 112 |
Copyright | |
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Common terms and phrases
Amakusa Ashikita District Association for Countering began boat burakumin cats Chisso Corporation Chisso factory Chisso Workers convulsions Countering Minamata Disease Diet members Disease victims doctors dragon eyes feel fell ill fishermen Fishermen's Union front Grandpa gray mullet hands head Health Hyakken Ishimure Japan Japanese jōdo Kagoshima Prefecture Kiyoto Kugai jōdo Kuhei Kumamoto Prefecture Kumamoto University Kuryū Gongen Kyūshū legs living looked mercury poisoning methyl mercury Minamata area Minamata Bay Minamata citizens Minamata City Hospital Minamata Disease patients Minamata Disease Ward Minamatabyō Mohei Moku Mokutarō mother movement Mutual Help Society never Niigata Niigata Minamata Disease old Ezuno organic mercury Paradise pollution rice Sachiko seemed Sensuke's Shiranui Sea shōchū sister soul strange disease symptoms tion Tokyo town TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION Tsukinoura Tsurumatsu University Hospital victims of Minamata wakame walk wastewater wife woman young Yudō Yuki Yuki's Yuri