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Hajime Hosokawa (細川 一, Hosokawa Hajime, 23 September 1901 – 13 October 1970) was director of the company hospital attached to the Chisso Corporation's chemical factory in Minamata, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan. He was the first doctor to discover and treat patients of the massive outbreak of mercury poisoning that occurred in the town, which became known as Minamata disease.
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Minamata disease, sometimes referred to as Chisso-Minamata disease, is a neurological disease caused by severe mercury poisoning. Signs and symptoms include ataxia, numbness in the hands and feet, general muscle weakness, loss of peripheral vision, and damage to hearing and speech. In extreme cases, insanity, paralysis, coma, and death follow within weeks of the onset of symptoms. A congenital form of the disease can also affect fetuses in the womb.
Minamata is a city located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. It is on the west coast of Kyūshū and faces Amakusa islands. Minamata was established as a village in 1889, re-designated as a town in 1912 and grew into a city in 1949.
The Japan New Party was a Japanese political party that existed briefly from 1992 to 1994.
Showa Denko K. K., founded in 1939 by the merger of Nihon Electrical Industries and Showa Fertilizers, both established by a Japanese entrepreneur Nobuteru Mori, is a Japanese chemical company producing chemical products and industrial materials.
The Chisso Corporation, since 2012 reorganized as JNC, is a Japanese chemical company. It is an important supplier of liquid crystal used for LCDs, but is best known for its role in the 34-year-long pollution of the water supply in Minamata, Japan that led to thousands of deaths and victims of disease.
Shisei Kuwabara is a photojournalist best known for his depiction of the effects of mercury poisoning on people in and near Minamata over a period of some forty years.
The four big pollution diseases of Japan were a group of man-made diseases all caused by environmental pollution due to improper handling of industrial wastes by Japanese corporations. The first occurred in 1912, and the other three occurred in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mercury(II) sulfate, commonly called mercuric sulfate, is the chemical compound HgSO4. It is an odorless solid that forms white granules or crystalline powder. In water, it separates into an insoluble sulfate with a yellow color and sulfuric acid.
Minamata is a small factory town. Minamata Bay is a bay on the west coast of Kyūshū island, located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan. The bay is part of the larger Shiranui Sea which is sandwiched between the coast of the Kyūshū mainland and the off-lying islands of Kumamoto and Nagasaki prefectures.
Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath is a photograph taken by American photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in 1971. Many commentators regard Tomoko as Smith's greatest work. The black-and-white photo depicts a mother cradling her severely deformed, naked daughter in a traditional Japanese bathroom. The mother, Ryoko Uemura, agreed to deliberately pose the startlingly intimate photograph with Smith to illustrate the terrible effects of Minamata disease on the body and mind of her daughter Tomoko. Upon publication the photo became world-famous, significantly raising the international profile of Minamata disease and the struggle of the victims for recognition and compensation. At the wishes of Tomoko Uemura's family, the photograph was withdrawn from further publication in 1997, 20 years after Tomoko's death.
Niigata Minamata disease is a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning. Identical in symptoms to the original outbreak of Minamata disease in Kumamoto Prefecture, the second outbreak in Niigata Prefecture was confirmed with the same name in 1965. The disease was caused by severe mercury poisoning, the source of which was methylmercury released in the wastewater from mercury sulfate-catalysed acetaldehyde production at the Showa Electrical Company's chemical plant in Kanose village. This highly toxic compound was released untreated into the Agano River where it bioaccumulated up the food chain, contaminating fish which when eaten by local people caused symptoms including ataxia, numbness in the hands and feet, general muscle weakness, narrowing of the field of vision and damage to hearing and speech.
The following is a timeline of key events related to Minamata disease:
The Minamata disease compensation agreements of 1959 were agreed between the polluting Chisso company and representative groups of fishermen and Minamata disease patients who had been affected by mercury pollution. The agreements and their formation shared a number of common characteristics. They were formulated outside the legal system, by ad-hoc mediation committees specially established for the purpose. Members of the committees and the final agreements were weighted in favour of Chisso and all included punitive clauses that the groups could make no future claims for compensation against the company.
Noriaki Tsuchimoto was a Japanese documentary film director known for his films on Minamata disease and examinations of the effects of modernization on Asia. Tsuchimoto and Shinsuke Ogawa have been called the "two figures [that] tower over the landscape of Japanese documentary."
Toroku arsenic disease was a disease resulting from air and water pollution from a refinery at a mine at Toroku, located in Takachiho, Nishiusuki District, Miyazaki, Japan.
Shitagau Noguchi was a Japanese entrepreneur who founded the Nichitsu zaibatsu. Known as the father of electrochemical engineering in Japan, he invested heavily in the development of Korea and Manchukou in cooperation with the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. His company was dissolved under the American occupation after World War II, and its successor companies include the Chisso Corporation, and portions of Asahi Kasei, Sekisui Chemical Company, and Shin-Etsu Chemical.
The history of Kumamoto Prefecture has been documented from paleolithic times to the present. Kumamoto Prefecture is the eastern half of Hinokuni, and corresponds to what was once called Higo Province. Exceptions are the part of Kuma District, which had once been part of Sagara Domain, and Nagashima which was included in Kagoshima Prefecture.
Minamata: The Victims and Their World is a Japanese documentary made in 1971 by Noriaki Tsuchimoto. It is the first in a series of independent documentaries that Tsuchimoto made of the mercury poisoning incident in Minamata, Japan. Subsequent films in the series include The Shiranui Sea.
Shimokōbe Yukihira was a Japanese samurai of the late Heian and early Kamakura periods. He was one of the closest retainers of Minamoto no Yoritomo, the first Kamakura shōgun, and was a personal tutor to the second, Minamoto no Yoriie.