12 h, aug 4, 2021 y - MINAMATA WSWS How a Japanese corporation poisoned a community and an American photographer fought to expose it

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FROM World Socialist Web Site:

Minamata: How a Japanese corporation poisoned a community and an American photographer fought to expose it

by Jason Quill & Richard Phillips

Minamata, directed by artist and film producer Andrew Levitas (Georgetown), is about the industrial poisoning of a Japanese fishing village by the Chisso chemical company, and the struggle, beginning in 1971, by famed photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith to reveal the disastrous human consequences of this corporate crime.

Between 1951 and 1968, Chisso dumped thousands of tons of untreated wastewater containing the highly-toxic methylmercury into Minamata Bay in southwest Japan, poisoning local fish and other sea life.

Local residents, having always eaten fish from the bay, noticed strange behaviour and illness amongst cats in the 1950s, and then, in 1956, the first human cases appeared.

In the years that followed thousands of residents, including children suffered muscle weakness, disability, insanity, coma and death from severe mercury poisoning, with the company denying any responsibility for the health catastrophe.

Today, 2,283 people have been officially recognised as patients and it is widely acknowledged that over 75,000 people suffered from Minamata mercury poisoning. Over 1,700 lawsuits are still ongoing.

Minamata is a forceful examination of Chisso’s ruthless attempts to prevent any exposure of its operations and the suffering of its victims. Based on the book Minamata: A Warning to the World, by W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Mioko, the 115-minute film has brought its director into conflict with MGM, the movie’s North American distributor.

Levitas’s movie was completed in late 2019 and premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2020 and was supposed to be released in the US and the UK in February 2021. This did not occur.

MGM, notwithstanding a handful of international screenings this year, has “buried” the film, refusing to announce a North American release date because of the alleged “personal problems” of the film’s lead actor Johnny Depp. We will return to MGM’s outrageous censorship below.

Minamata opens with Smith (Depp) in the process of photographing “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath,” his acclaimed shot of a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter, who is afflicted by Minamata disease, in a traditional Japanese bath.

The extraordinarily moving black-and-white image, later considered by many as one of Smith’s greatest achievements, along with others from the Minamata series published by Life magazine, brought to American and international audiences the horror of Chisso’s mercury poisoning.

The film then flashes back to a year earlier. Smith, a semi-recluse in his Manhattan loft, is at a creative impasse. Alienated from his former wife and children, the acclaimed photographer is frustrated with publishers, still suffering post-traumatic stress from serious wounds and harrowing experiences in World War II and drinking heavily. (Sara Fishko’s 2015 documentary, The Jazz Loft According to W. Eugene Smith, is a valuable companion piece to Levitas’s movie [see: WSWS review and interview with the director.])

Aware of his socially conscious photographic work, Aileen Mioko (Minami Bages) approaches Smith to help expose the situation in Minamata. “There’s a resistance on the ground but we need global attention,” she says.

At first reluctant, Smith eventually decides to approach long-time collaborator and Life magazine editor Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy) and insists the latter send him to Japan in order to blow the story open.

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