Dogs and Demons   ::   Керр Алекс

Industry and government collaborated for forty years to hide the damage and prevent compensation from being paid to the victims of these disasters. At the outset of the Minamata scandal, Chisso hired gangsters to threaten petitioning victims; goons blinded Eugene Smith, the pioneering photographer who documented the agony and twisted limbs of the Minamata sufferers. Doctors investigating at Kumamoto University had their research money cut off. As recently as 1993, the Ministry of Education told a textbook publisher to delete the names of the companies responsible for Minamata, Itai-itai, and other industrial poisonings, even though they are a part of the public record.

Despite harassment, groups of victims managed to file their first suit for compensation in 1967, yet it was in the courts that the government had its ultimate victory. As has been eloquently described by Karel van Wolferen, Japan does not have an independent judiciary. The secretariat of the supreme court keeps judges strictly in line, and they dare not rule against the government; the police have broad powers to imprison without trial and to elicit confessions with methods verging on torture. An incredible 95 percent of lawsuits against the state end in rulings against the plaintiffs.

The primary tool of the government is delay. Legal cases in Japan, especially those filed against the government, take decades to resolve. A citizen suing the government or big industry stands an excellent chance of dying before his case comes to a verdict. This is precisely what happened at Minamata. In July 1994, the Osaka District Court finally passed judgment on a later suit filed in 1982 by fifty-nine plaintiffs. In the meantime, sixteen of them had died. The verdict: the court found no negligence on the part of either the national government or Kumamoto Prefecture for failing to stop Chisso from discharging mercury into the bay. The court turned down twelve of the surviving plaintiffs because the statute of limitations had, due to the long court case, run out. The judge ordered Chisso to pay surprisingly small damages of ¥3-8 million to each of the remaining plaintiffs. Only in 1995 did the main group of Minamata sufferers, representing two thousand plaintiffs, accept a mediated settlement with the government – almost forty years after doctors detected the first poisonings.

In two separate cases, in October 1994 and December 1996, courts resolved air-pollution suits that were more than ten years old by stipulating that damages should be paid to nearby residents, while rejecting demands that the responsible companies be required to halt toxic discharges.