The New Minamata

When a Save Japan Dolphins Team got involved in what was going on awhile back and launched a world-wide expose of this honored practice, we were outraged not only by the bloody horror of it but also by the protective silence of government and media alike—all this quite contrary to Article 21 of the Japanese Constitution, which prohibits the suppression of news.

You don’t need a degree in explaining things to understand how all this got started, the fishermen rounding up dolphins, slaughtering them with their long, sharp knives. It’s a business to them and it’s been going on for hundreds of years, fishermen selling the rich, red meat mostly to their Japanese neighbors.

But there is much new information which is ignored by the government of Japan. The hunts today would not be profitable if the global aquarium industry and “swim-with-dolphins” tourist programs were not subsidizing the dolphin killers by paying enormous sums for a handful of dolphins for captivity. And the government is helping subsidize the meat trade by using dolphin meat for school lunch programs, since it is not popular on the open market.

It might seem that exposing this to the light of day would in itself cause it to disappear. But not in Japan. When we went to authorities for an explanation, they turned a deaf ear to us. It was as if nobody cared. We were told that this was part of Japan’s tradition, its culture. Mayor S. Hamanaka of Taiji proudly announced that he and his fellow citizens are a whaling people, and they explain it like this: “You kill cows and sheep, and we kill dolphins and whales. You don’t understand us.”

But I think we do, and so our work began. Then almost immediately something that happened in Japan even more terrible came to the surface, the puzzling events of 50 years ago in Minamata Bay, where what was called Minamata disease broke out. It began simply enough. Citizens first noticed their cats wobbling around on the docks. The cats all went into conniption fits and keeled over into the water.

It was a village mystery and experts were called in. After a series of tests on the cats’ bodies, scientists determined that It was mercury poisoning, the result of many decades of dumping mercury-contaminated waste by a chemical company on Kyushu Island that spilled into the bay with other concentrated pollutants already there, including PCBs and heavy metals. But this was not just a disease of cats. It struck humans, too, as more than 100 local citizens, especially children, came down with Minamata disease, which had all the classic effects of mercury poisoning in the ensuing months. They got it by eating seafood and shell fish in the bay. Like the Mad Hatters’ Disease, this Japanese malady attacks the nervous system, causing the body to twitch and jerk around uncontrollably, affecting speech and often resulting in death. Pregnant women’s babies are particularly susceptible to mercury poisoning, often resulting in severe disabilities for their children. An estimated 10,000 persons were contaminated by mercury, more than 3,000 of whom died. Eating fish and shell fish from the area was banned.

This may have begun as a local contamination, but now it’s everywhere. And now not only are all the oceans of the world contaminated like Minamata Bay, every ocean on earth is full of it and practically to the same degree. Mercury in the bodies of dolphins in Taiji today is higher than it was in the fish when Minamata disease first struck. Recent independent studies at supermarkets in several areas of Japan show that the meat of dolphins and other whales range from about four times higher to nearly 36 times higher than the Health Ministry’s safe level of 0.04ppm (parts per million). There are only a small group of whalers in Taiji doing all this, and they feel betrayed because they are slowly realizing that their work product has become worthless. It is no longer fit for human consumption, nor for pet food, nor even fertilizer. All they can do with it now is treat it and dispose of it as toxic waste. But they don't do that. They continue to sell the tainted dolphin meat and export it to the unsuspecting consumers in other parts of Japan. Taiji has become the new Minamata.

The parts-per-million numbers tell the story. For general safety, 0.03ppm shouldn’t be exceeded. In Japan the number is 0.04ppm. But it doesn’t matter. Recent studies of meat from dolphin and other whales exceeds that by an average of about 13.5 times, sometimes ranging to more than 35 times. This is true of tuna, too. All large predatory fish or sea mammals are suspect. This is easy to explain. These predatory sea creatures eat smaller fish. The small fish often themselves feed on things in the ocean that are loaded with mercury and other contaminants. When the dolphin or tuna eats hundreds or more of these small fish every day, the mercury and other poisons in the small fish are stored in the large fish.

And does that drive the large fish crazy as it does the cats of Minamata Bay and the thousands of people who came down with the Minamata disease after eating the tuna or dolphin? Of course it does.

Most of the Japanese people know nothing about all this because the government of Japan is protecting its precious whaling tradition and an impressive portion of Japan’s economy that is based on whaling and especially commercial fishing, protecting all this from bad publicity by imposing a lid of silence on news about mercury poisoning threatening their nation. The only newspaper that has written about it in Japan is the Japan Times. But that newspaper is published only in the English language, and few Japanese read it.

So what happens next to the people of Japan? And what happens also to the rest of the people on earth who know nothing about what is going on in the sea?

We’ll know soon.

** The Oceanic Preservation Society has produced a documentary film about this issue. Tentatively titled The Rising, it will be in theaters in January, 2009. The film is expected to do what the Japanese media failed to do: inform the Japanese public about mercury posioning. Go to the web page for the film: www.opsociety.org.